Pioneers in Science and Technology Series: Keith Glennan

PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. KEITH GLENNAN
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
May 14, 1985
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
DR. GLENNAN: Well we have to go back quite a ways now since my wife and I had our 50th wedding anniversary just three years ago, but I can remember a little bit about what happened to me except that I don’t recall being born. I was born in Enderlin, North Dakota. My father was a train dispatcher at the head of the rails. Head of the rails meaning the railroad was being built to the west and we lived in a boxcar and moved with the laying of the rails and he set up his office in the boxcar of course. My childhood was spent pretty much in Montana, the first seven years out in Three Forks, Montana, right in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Then Dad was, I guess he was a night truck dispatcher there and decided he wanted to come back east and he went back to the Chicago and Northwestern and we lived in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. There I went through my elementary and secondary school and I was going to be a teacher, strangely enough.
MR. LARSON: What subjects were you particularly interested in?
DR. GLENNAN: Well, I was interested in math. I just took a lot of math and unfortunately I learned everything by rote. I didn’t understand how you derived the equation or used to be the, used mathematics sensibly. I did very well. I got A’s all the way through, but after I had been there in this teacher training college for about six months I suppose, I was asked to go back to my old high school and do a substitute job. I did it for three days. Now I was a kid.
MR. LARSON: What subject did you substitute in?
DR. GLENNAN: It was in geometry, plain geometry. I guess the problem was the kids were older than I and they took advantage of me. I decided right then and there that maintaining discipline in the classroom was not going to be the rest of my life work. So I said, I’m going on to college. My family, I had a brother and a sister, brother older, sister younger and nobody in the family had ever go beyond high school. My father had only gone through the fourth grade. So this was a new experience.
MR. LARSON: Of course that was very common back in the early part of the century. It was a little bit unusual even to go to college.
DR. GLENNAN: Very unusual. I think only 10 percent of the age group got to college when I went there in 1924. Well, in any event, I did find a way to get into college through the very great help of a friend of mine who lived in Eau Claire, the son of a Norwegian doctor. He was at Yale as a freshman while I was finishing my second year at Eau Claire State Normal School. He convinced me I should try to, I should send in an application. Well, I got the application back and it said, “No.” Pete went to the registrar and said, “I think you’re making a mistake, Mr. Registrar. Yale would be very good for Glennan and Glennan will be very good for Yale.” Well that did the trick. I received a letter somewhat later saying if I could come to New Haven for an interview they would reconsider my case.
MR. LARSON: Yes. As I remember at that time, at least in my experience, in order to get into Yale or Harvard it was almost mandatory that you go to a special preparatory school.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes, and the SATs were just coming in at that time. I didn’t do any of that, but I went down to New Haven. My father, I got a job driving a lady to New York. I was at the time working in a clothing store in the afternoon and she came in and she said, “Keith, do you know where I can find somebody who can drive me to New York?” I said, “Well, if you’ll just wait a minute, I’ll go look.” I went upstairs to the office and I quit. I came back and I said, “I’m your man.” Well we had a Cadillac ’57 as I recall it and we went across the Lincoln trail, Lincoln Road, whatever we called it at that time and stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria. I remember going into New York. I had stopped to let somebody go across the street and a cop called out to me. “Hey, farmer, run into them. They’ll get out of your way.” Well, I went up to New Haven and finally was accepted with a condition in surveying. We had a summer course in surveying. Well, I hit that and I was there as a sophomore. They gave me credit for two years.
MR. LARSON: Well good.
DR. GLENNAN: I took electrical engineering because all of my family were in the railroad business and at that particular time in history, the railroads were electrifying from New York to New Haven and Hartford to Pennsylvania, Milwaukee to where we lived out in Three Forks, Montana, was in the midst of an electrification program. I said, “I’m going to be a railroad man. I better take electrical engineering.” I did. I remember I had had college physics so-called in this teachers training college and I had, kept very fine notebooks. Oh, they were just right, up to snuff. When I went in there I went up to see the head of the physics department, Sheffield Scientific School as it was then known. He wouldn’t give me credit for any of it. He said, “No, you’ll take freshman physics here.” I went to the dean and the dean says, “You know those scientists. They think nothing is very important unless it has a tag science on it. We’ll give you…” I had told him that I was interested in people. How did you get things done through other people and I wanted to understand something about personnel administration and economics and that sort of thing. He was very understanding, Dean Warren. So I was given a C in physics and I’ve regretted it ever since, Clarence. I don’t know enough about physics to fill a thimble and it’s been a very sincere regret of mine all my life.
MR. LARSON: Well you’ve hidden that deficiency very well because you’ve always seemed to talk authoritatively on applications of physics.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes, well one has to do that. You know you have to stay ahead of the crowd. While there I got a job. I went there with $250 I had saved. My first bill was $350. I decided that I just had to go to work. So I went out manicuring lawns, and selling clothes. I got one suit. The twelfth suit that I sold was mine. I was one of the better dressed men on that campus. But finally, I had a letter from a high school teacher of mine to a professor, Professor Adams, who was a distinguished professor of economics at Yale. I went to see him when I finally found that I couldn’t make it and he looked at me. He was a very distinguished looking man and he finally gotten to the fact that I was looking for a job. He said, “Can you drive?” I said, “Well, I’ve driven summers for the last couple of years.” “All right, I’ll buy a car,” says he. I was aghast, and he said, “Well maybe I should have you go out and see Mrs. Adams first.” So that day I think I took my last dollar and bought myself a pair of Plus Fours , those were all the rage in those days. This was 1924, and got on a street car the next day and went out and saw Mrs. Adams, but as I walked into the house, it was a modest house, in a entry hall there was a baby grand piano, and there was a girl with a very peculiar hair-do who was the younger daughter of the family, Ruth, and she is now my wife.
MR. LARSON: That is a remarkable story. Really is.
DR. GLENNAN: I drove for the rest of those three years while I was in college and lived part-time with the Adams, that is I took dinner with them every night. I had a room there if I wanted it. I got to know a good many of their friends and I think that my time with the Adams was much more important to me. I learned more about life and how you get things done and how you behave, if you will, than I did at Yale. Believe me. So they had a friend by the name of Wilcox who was with Westinghouse, I believe, yes, and he’d been involved in the very first days of talking motion pictures. This was in the days of Vitafilm. Warner Brothers was the originator of that term and when I was about to graduate, I asked him if there was any chance for me to get into that. I had had an offer from the Pennsylvania Railroad, so I was going to make my railroad career, but I think they were going to pay me $18 a week or something like that and I had to pay some debts because I was in debt when I got out of school. He gave me an opportunity to use my Easter vacation to try it out. I went out to Chicago and worked there for about 10 days and learned something about what I was getting into and was excited by it. Of course this was a new business.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: Absolutely a new business.
MR. LARSON: About what year was that?
DR. GLENNAN: That was in 1927, the spring of 1927. And the first talkie on Broadway had been shown August 26, 1926, short subjects. [Giovanni] Martinelli I recall and Will Hayes who was then the director, the job that Jack Valenti now has, the Motion Picture Association. Well, I’ll skip over a little bit here because I could go on for hours on this, but I did go to work for them five days after I graduated and I was being paid $35 a week.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: No overtime, nothing like that. I reported on Monday morning in New York and at 11 o’clock, I was on my way to Philadelphia. And Clarence, I got to bed on Friday night of that week, we worked right around the clock, maybe snatching an hour on the rug in the foyer or something like that, but when I finally went out to dinner on Friday night, I fell asleep in the soup. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: That’s a remarkable story. That certainly required a concentration of effort in order to get those things done.
DR. GLENNAN: Well this was exciting and I was sent all around this country, Chicago, Sacramento, and then up to Seattle, where for about six or seven months I was a service engineer. Now I didn’t know a vacuum tube from a light bulb. At Yale, in those days in the undergraduate school, you’ve got no vacuum tube theory, nothing of that sort. You had to be in the graduate school.
MR. LARSON: That’s amazing.
DR. GLENNAN: So I didn’t know how to read a circuit, but I found that the practical use of a hammer and a wrench and a screwdriver, you could fix most of the problems that occurred. I was shipped from Seattle, where by the way I found two of those proverbial five real friends that one finds in one’s life, two of them. They were great friends. They are both gone now, but my, what fun that was. I was a man of mystery. We locked the projection room door so that even the owner of the theater couldn’t get into it. We made it so mysterious how this sound worked.
MR. LARSON: Of course most people can’t remember, they aren’t old enough what a sensation talking pictures made when they came out. It really changed people’s lives. It was a great social phenomenon that most people take for granted now.
DR. GLENNAN: On that comment, Clarence, I certainly felt during the war when I was in this business, that we were really contributing by providing entertainment at a very low cost to people who had literally nothing. They couldn’t drive. They didn’t have any other means of entertainment. They flocked to the theaters. They cost very little, so we felt that we were keeping the morale up anyway. Then to Los Angeles, where I got into the first steps of management and about six months later I was asked to go to Europe. I went to London in August of 1928 and was there for about 19 months, during which time I learned something about my wife, Ruth Adams. She came over on leave for summer courses, I think, eating chocolate and learning a little French, down in Geneva. I met her at the boat, didn’t think about flying then, although we flew across the Channel, that sort of thing, but flying the oceans wasn’t being done then. I had envisioned having her come down the gang plank into my arms and she came down [moves arms wildly]. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Very formal. (Laughter)
DR. GLENNAN: Well, then, after I came back to this country then in 1930 and was made division superintendent with a base in Washington, was here for about 12, nine months. My territory ran from Baltimore down to New Orleans. I had about 700 theaters and five branch offices with about 35 men, so I was beginning to put into practice that which I had told Dean Warren I really wanted to do, get the job done through somebody else. ’31, Ruth and I were married back in New Haven. I was then taken back to the New York office where I was asked to start an educational film exchange. ERPI at that time, that was the name of the firm with which I was associated, Electrical Research Products, Incorporated, a fully owned subsidiary of Western Electric Company. They asked me then, but I made several changes. It was interesting because each of them were starting something new, and that is characteristic of my life as you will see going on through, but they asked me to go out to the old Edison Studios in the Bronx. Thomas Edison had had a studio named Edison Studios in the Bronx and I became general manager of this sound recording, lights, cameras, and all of that. We rented the stage, provided all the equipment. A man came in with some money we hoped and with his cast and director and he produced the picture. I remember we did a continuing news reel there with Graham McNamee as the announcer.
MR. LARSON: A grand old man.
DR. GLENNAN: I should say. Well that went on for, I suppose, nine months or a year. We re-equipped the studio during that time, and then Paramount was a creditor of ERPI and they had a big studio over on Long Island, the Astoria Studios. We took those over for the bad debts and I became vice president and general manager of that. Now this was in 1931. I was 26 years old, something like that. We made Emperor Jones there, I remember, with Paul Robeson. It was a fascinating thing to be introduced to the motion pictures in that way. I was responsible for managing the studio, providing the crews, cameramen and all the rest of that, carpenters, make-up artists, that type of thing.
MR. LARSON: I believe that is one of the classics of all time, Emperor Jones with Robeson.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes, I think it is. It was a great picture. Then ERPI asked me to go to the West Coast and take a look at a problem they had out there very much like the Paramount problem, at Metropolitan Studios where the Christie Comedies were made. You’re old enough to remember the Christie Comedies and they were in debt to ERPI for quite a bit of money, would I go out and take a look at it? I said, “Well, I’m just about to go on a holiday with my wife.” He says, “Well, go out through the Canal.” So we took a trip through the Canal and on the way out the Volstead Act was cancelled. So we were on the boat and did we enjoy that evening when everybody was, I think, well-oiled before we landed. In any event, I recommended we take it over and we make a service studio out of that. I was then asked to go out there and asked to be vice president and general manager of that. A man by the name of [inaudible] Rothecker [sp?] was going to be the president. He would go out and sell the stuff and I would provide the management hiring crews, really the operating part of the studio is my responsibility. From there, Clarence, I was there a year and a half perhaps, about that, no, just about a year and the first president of ERPI became the president of Paramount. He was out there and he came over to see me and asked if I would come over and consult in the operations of the Paramount Studios out there. Well in three months I became operations manager for Paramount. That went on for about five years. The last two of which I was studio manager of Paramount and then I was fired. There is no coming-of-age in the picture business until you’re fired.
MR. LARSON: That’s absolutely, it’s almost like university presidents. They last very long in that business.
DR. GLENNAN: That’s right. This is all a part of the business. I had the first engineering department in Hollywood. I wanted to apply, what to me, were some management techniques to the scheduling of the making of a picture, got a couple of people, directors to go along with it. We precut the picture before it was shot. That should have saved a good bit of money and it did. We didn’t have so much film to throw away, but the, I think that got a little bit rich for the general manager’s blood and he called me in one day and he said, “You know Keith, things aren’t going well.” I said, “I know very well that they aren’t going well.” He said, “Well we would like to have you leave.” I said, “I’ll leave right now. I’ll go cut my books and get out of the office.” “Well, we want to pay you something.” I said that I would not take the settlement. They finally paid me four months’ salary and that, an interesting thing, I was earning at that time more than I earned for the next 16 years.
MR. LARSON: That’s amazing.
DR. GLENNAN: It wasn’t all that much, but it looked like a lot to me. We had by that time three children and I went over to Lockheed. I had known again, through Ruth’s father, Bob Gross, the president of Lockheed and he gave me a job. Well, I didn’t know anything about airplanes or how you made them or anything like that, but I was there for about seven months and it was strange. I lived over in Bel Air at that time. 7:30 was the starting time and I had to go about a mile to get there. I really changed my way of life. I lasted for about six months in that and finally said they don’t know how to manage this thing. I don’t know much about airplanes. I don’t think this is the place for me and I went into see Mr. Gross. I said, “I’m resigning, Bob, but in resigning, I would like to tell you what I think is wrong at Vega.” This was the Vega Ventura was the plane that was being built at that time, was to say the paperwork on it weighed more than the plane did. In any event, Bob listened to me for a couple of hours and he said, “Keith, you just wait. On Thursday next, Cortland will be back.” Cortland was Bob’s brother and was the manager, general manager, vice president, whatever it was of the Vega subsidiary. Well that meeting never took place. I went in the following Saturday with my resignation to give to the general manager of the Vega plant and found that they had my check ready. So we met in the middle. I went back. I had already been asked to go to Sam Goldwyn, as studio manager there. I was there for about a year and half until the war started.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: Do you remember Vern Newtson by chance? He was an acoustician.
MR. LARSON: Oh, the name is very familiar. In fact isn’t there something about a Newtson effect or something like that.
DR. GLENNAN: Probably. In any event, he was running, the early days of the San Diego submarine warfare laboratory and Timothy Shay, Tim Shay with whom I had worked at ERPI, was working with the Columbia University division of war research under Dean Piegram, whom you did know.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: I had a little trouble getting through to Vern Newtson, I hadn’t known him, but I went down to see him and I called Tim and I said, “Can you give me some help, Tim? I want to get into this war.” I was in, this would have been, I was 35 years old. I was a little bit beyond draft age. Tim says, “Wait, I’m coming out next Saturday.” So I met him at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, he said, “Well go right on Keith. I’ll help you all I can here. Well, why don’t you come back and work for me?” “Well, what’s that?” “Well we have the US Navy underwater sound laboratory in New London, Connecticut. We are just starting it from scratch.” I said, “Sure.” So by this time we were flying across and I went back with him on Monday, came back on Tuesday and was at work a week later in New London, leaving Ruth to move the family back.
MR. LARSON: Well, that was a quite a change and of course it was extremely important with regard to minimizing submarine losses.
DR. GLENNAN: Yeah. Well, going on now. We went through the war. The laboratory was quite successful. I applied, interestingly enough, some of the techniques I had learned in Hollywood. We had an exhibit room when the Admirals came in. We had boards with cut outs and miniatures of the various devices we were working on so we could give them a real sales talk, and we designed and built what is known as the radio sonavoy [sp?]. So, far as I can remember, there were nine German submarines that were killed using those sonavoys to find them, dropping acoustic ordinances on them, at that point. Well, three years go by and I then went to Binghamton, New York, with Ansco, part of the Agfa film business which was in the Aniline property custodians hands. I was told it was going to be sold by the government in six months. Well I guess it was six years later before anything like that happened.
MR. LARSON: It takes a long time for that stuff…
DR. GLENNAN: But I did a variety of things. I was the head of a 400 man engineering department for a time, ran a camera plant that I never knew how to put a camera together, but I found out and worked in the film plant for a time, but I was a little bit tired. I was looking for something else. We were going to have a reunion of our laboratory staff in New York and Vannevar Bush was coming to be the speaker of the evening. I was going to see a man by the name of Bill Snow who had been on our staff in New London, former Bell Labs man, and it turned out that he wanted me to meet somebody from Oak Ridge. Now we’re getting close to the nuclear business and it was the head of Kellex, Kellogg, Kellex and we discussed the job of engineer manager or something as that. I thought it was way over my head, but I listened. In that same two days, one of my former laboratory associates from Cleveland asked me to meet him and I met him at the Yale Club for breakfast and he said, “Keith, how would you like to be a college president?” (Laughter) I said, “Chuck, I would love it I guess, but it isn’t done that way. Come on tell me more.” Well he was a graduate of Case. He had been with me for three years in New London and he had put my name in the pot when they were looking for a president. Over the next few weeks or months I made trips out there and had trustees ask me, “How would you go about raising money?” I said, “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never raised a nickel in my life.” And the fine old chairman of the board, Frank Quail came in for one of these meetings, said, “What kind of speeches do you make, Mr. Glennan?” I said, “I don’t know. I never made one.” Well they somehow or other agreed they couldn’t miss by very much because Case had been somewhat decimated during the war. With the exception of the metallurgy and the chemical engineering groups, the faculty had gone to the laboratories like the radiation laboratory in, if I remember, Bob Shacklen [sp?] was in charge of the acoustic measurements laboratory for CUDWR [Columbia University Division of War Research].
MR. LARSON: That was a problem common to many colleges and universities after the war because they never came back, including myself. I was a college professor who never came back.
DR. GLENNAN: Is that right? (Laughter) Well, Ruthie and I talked about this. She came from an academic family of course. I had none of that background, therefore I say three years essentially living with that family, Professor Adams and his wife, stood me in good stead. Ruthie and I use to talk about making our pile and starting a boys’ school. Well I finally didn’t make the pile, but I got the boys’ school because Case at that time was a male-only school. I went there in 1947, in August and then in 19… well I thought about what I should do. I didn’t know what a faculty looked like, how they acted, what their prerogatives were, how they were organized. I thought the thing to do is get them busy. So I went to Syracuse and saw Bill Tolley there who had had what he called a self-survey made at Syracuse when he went to Syracuse as president, chancellor. So I proposed this to the board out in Cleveland and they were a little bit non-committal on it, but I went ahead anyway. I thought maybe we could get this done in maybe six weeks, I mean in six months. It took two full years. I found there the dichotomy between the scientist and the engineer: they’re absolute, fairly absolute ignoring of the social sciences and the softer sciences. Well we did manage to bring the engineers and scientists together. I would have a curriculum say in the metallurgy department looked at by a man from the history department and a man from the chemistry department and a man from the metallurgy department. We began to get them even to going to lunch together.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. A great step it was.
DR. GLENNAN: It was a fascinating experience. Case had been Dayton Miller’s home base, you know, and Bob Shacklen was the head of the physics department, had been a student of his and had been a student of Arthur Compton’s out of Chicago. Bob had built a 30 rev betatron, the only one in the United States that didn’t have any federal dollars in it.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: Well, we thought we ought to celebrate that when we got a beam. I said lets strike out high and I tried to get Dave Lilienthal to come up and dedicate this. Well Lilienthal was busy, but he sent Louis Straws and that is where I first came to know Louis. We spent, I suppose, four or five hours together. Louis, as you know, is a fascinating set of paradoxes in some way. His, he was a gentleman through and through and I don’t know of anybody that was more patriotic in his own way than Louis. He was leaving the commission shortly thereafter and he recommended me for his replacement. I remember that. I had taken the family out west in 1950, driven across the country, six of us by that time and coming back, we stopped overnight in Indianapolis and there was a telephone. I called in, rather, I found that there was a telephone call from the White House. Well, I said that’s peculiar. I don’t know anybody at the White House, but I’ll call. I called and it was a chap who was down at the White House for the summer helping Donald Dawson recruit people for particular jobs in the administration and I laughed at him. He wanted to know whether I would be, allow my name to be put in for a candidate for a commissionership in the AEC. I hardly knew what AEC meant frankly.
MR. LARSON: Let’s see. What year was that?
DR. GLENNAN: That was in 1950. It would have been probably in June or July of 1950 and he kept me talking and I finally said, “Well, look if you’re serious about this, who am I to refuse to listen. So yes, I will listen.” I went on home, told my board something about this, talked it over with two or three other people there. I said I don’t think anything will ever come of it, but it’s interesting that this call came to me. Well it wasn’t too long before Don Dawson called me to come down on a Monday to see the President. Well, here is a little farmer boy running an institution which at that time probably had a budget of $3 million, all in, construction and everything else, and looking at the AEC which I learned had some astronomical figures in its budget. I had never read the act. I didn’t understand anything about it, but I went to Washington and I saw several good friends there. Their names sort of escape me at the moment, Quarrels, Don Quarrels, no, Don was later on. I just don’t remember them. In any event, he only encouraged me to think seriously about this and finally I had let Mr. Dawson know where I was staying and he could reach me there. He called me in and we talked about it for quite a while. Then he began giving me a lecture about patriotism and finally I got a little bit irked I said, “Mr. Dawson, I don’t think I need any lecture from you on patriotism. I’m running an institution known as Case Institute of Technology and we are trying to turn it out as fine a class of patriotism as you can find in this country.” Well he backed off and I said, “I’m going back to the hotel. You can get me if you want.” He said, “Wait a minute, Mr. Glennan, I think the President wants to see you.” So I sat back down. I was ushered into Mr. Truman’s office. People have asked me, “What was your impression of Mr. Truman?” I honestly couldn’t have given you an impression of Mr. Truman. I was the farmer boy looking into the Oval Office and there was the President of the United States. I was in complete awe I guess, but at least I said, “Good morning, Mr. President.” I didn’t say, “Good morning, Mr. Truman.” Well, he had me sit down and he talked with me very seriously for perhaps ten minutes telling me about the work of the Atomic Energy Commission, about his great interest in the peaceful uses of it, but he did not minimize the necessity for getting on with the weapons work or other. Then he finally said, I said very little in this, and I responded to questions. He said, “I don’t know that I’m going to offer you this post, Mr. Glennan, but I think I want to. I want you to go and see Gordon Dean, the new chairman of the commission and then I will let you know and I hope you will not keep me waiting with an answer.” So I said, “Well, Mr. President, I am flattered and a little dumbfounded. I don’t think you could have found a person less qualified for this job if you had scrapped the bottom of every barrel in the room.” I will never forget his smile as he said, “Mr. Glennan, I’m not sure you’re the best judge of that.”
MR. LARSON: That’s a very astute character, Mr. Truman.
DR. GLENNAN: I went and saw Gordon Dean, liked him. I met Harry Smithe for the first time and the rest of the commission was Sumner Pick and Tom Murray. Harold Wilson had been there as the general manager. Oh, I called Vannevar Bush to seek his advice on taking a post such as this. I said, “Van, you know me. You know what little I know.” He said, “Well you did a pretty good job. I think you ought to go see Carol Wilson. Make up your mind after you’ve talked with him, because he’s in the operating end and that’s the fort that you will be holding than almost anything else.” So I did go to see Carol Wilson. I first saw Dean again and he said, “I don’t know if it’s important that you see Carol Wilson. He is leaving.” He had resigned. He felt that the commissioners were getting into management too much and he told me all about this. I went and saw him and he told me all about this, but in any event, I did decide that I couldn’t refuse this request. I went back home, got things straightened out back there and reported on October 1. My first impressions included a few strange things. I suppose I was there for two weeks before any commissioner came into my office to say hello or have a cup of coffee with me. I finally asked General McCormick, who is then Colonel McCormick, head of the military Paris liaison, that group, about this, and he said, “Oh, I think you’re just a little bit touchy on that,” and he arranged for me to meet with a couple of the commissioners. We had lunch together and began to know each other. The first question asked of me by the staff was what kind of a car do you want? I said, “I don’t want a car. I came down here to go to work.” They said, “Well, you’re entitled to a car and a driver.” I said, “Forget it. I have my own car.” Well about two months later, I was quite willing to take that car and driver because I found I was, had to use the time going back and forth home reading, catching up with the paperwork that came across that desk.
MR. LARSON: Not to mention all of the parking time that was necessary, shuffling between Congress, various offices, military and so on.
DR. GLENNAN: You’re quite right about that. Then I asked Joe Valpea [sp?] who was our general council if I couldn’t meet Dave Lilienthal, and Joe did arrange a luncheon. I will never forget that. We had the ususal chit-chat and finally I said, “Mr. Lilienthal, as you know I am the newest and youngest commissioner there. What advice do you have for a commissioner?” He said, “Go home.” He was dedicated then to the single commissioner head of the agency, rather than the five commissioners. Well that was a shock. I learned…
MR. LARSON: I would imagine that would be a shock.
DR. GLENNAN: I learned something about it from him. I also found that I was startled. I went right into the meetings. Nobody said don’t participate for a while, just watch. I was eager, willing to do any work that had to be done, but you may recall, they had a big room where you were in posh quarters; I was still down on Constitution Avenue.
MR. LARSON: Commissioners always have nice meeting rooms.
DR. GLENNAN: But about 30 or 40 staff members sat in that room throughout every commission meeting. The commissioners didn’t meet together to talk about what they were going to discuss and I was just startled that that kind of thing could go on. You couldn’t be quite as frank as you wanted to be with the staff there. You know how that would…
MR. LARSON: Not with 30 staff, no.
DR. GLENNAN: So I finally asked for a meeting of the commission and the general manager and I said, “I just think it is wrong to go in there and be debating something in which there may be deep divisions, but divisions that you won’t quite say what you wish you could say, because you got that staff sitting out there.” Well, we finally decided that we would take Tuesday afternoons, I guess, and that we would have a commission seminar of our own, the five commissioners, the general manager and the general council and I guess that practice was continued for a very long time. Well, it made a lot of difference in the commission meetings then because we would beat our heads against each other. I can remember Tom Murray calling me names in there. He wouldn’t have done that in the commission meeting and I think it was a useful exercise. We had the usual debates, what particular aspect of the commission’s business would you assign to each man. We decided you don’t assign it to each man, but we began to settle into areas where we were really interested. I was interested along with Harry Smithe, we became very fast friends, in the operation of the laboratories. I was interested in the possibility for nuclear power someplace down the road. I was interested in how the organization was put together. You can see that I was not the scientist. We went on in those days; we were really in a very rapid buildup stage.
MR. LARSON: Yes. I remember some great decisions on thermonuclear weapons, I believe, and the buildup had started.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes. K-25, K-27, Paducah and Portsmouth were all started while I happened to be there.
MR. LARSON: Savannah River was…
DR. GLENNAN: Savannah River, my gracious. I got to know Walter Williams and have the greatest of respect for him. Our general manager was Marion [inaudible]. He was a fine person. He came from SO [Standard Oil], New Jersey Standard at that time. We didn’t have that, there was a new era of design for weapons. The weapons were being changed and some of them were being reworked. There weren’t that many of them in those days, but I learned something about the whole business, one could say. While I was there remembering how lost I felt and how stupid I felt in those first meetings of the commission, when Gene Zuckert [sp?] came over to replace Sumner Pick. He came over from the Air Force. I didn’t know Gene, but I got to know him quickly and I suggested to Gene that he go to the commission meetings, but not take part, don’t vote, doesn’t make any difference if there are four men voting or five. Let me set up a training schedule for you. For three months he would go one week he’d have sessions with the production people in Washington, then he would go out for another week and visit all the plants that were being built. He’d have a week with the weapons people and then he would go out to Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, etc. I think when he finally got into the real swing of it, he was better than any other commissioner had been, to take a responsible part. We went on, I stayed until, well, there was one other fascinating experience. Oh, there are many. I got to know Edward Teller. I got to know Ernest Lawrence, Gene Wigner, the great names in the business. Strangely enough almost from the beginning I never could agree with Edward Teller. He was going to kill every Russian and have more bombs than anybody else in the world. I just couldn’t buy that. We didn’t have any open debates, but it was an interesting experience to listen to Edward. He was a salesman par excellence, of course with those great flashing eyebrows of his, you know. We went through at that time, the building of a great vacuum chamber out at Livermore. This was before the Livermore Laboratory had started. That seemed to be a waste of time, but it turned out later to be a waste of time, except that we learned something about vacuum pumps at that time.
MR. LARSON: Yes. Well that was a big project that certainly was ill advised, but there was a lot of progress made.
DR. GLENNAN: Oh, my gracious. We were worrying about materials, raw materials. Jessie Johnson was head of the raw materials division for many, many years after that too. But I give Tom Murray credit for pushing the raw materials program and for pushing the big computer program, without which we wouldn’t have had as early a success for the hydrogen bomb as we did. Tom was a very devout Catholic, went to mass every morning before he came to the commission. He was not an easy person to be with, but I remember years later when I, he was retiring from the commission, I wrote him a letter in which I said, “I certainly give you all the credit for putting us in a better position with respect to raw materials and with respect to computing power,” and he wrote me back the nicest letter. I was awfully glad I had done that. This takes us, I guess, I have mentioned the fact that we have started all this construction activity. Incidentally you spoke of the Savannah River plant. We were going to take that site and it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard anybody describe it. So I asked about it and sure enough nobody had been down there. Harry Smithe and I got a plane from the Air Force and flew down there on a Sunday and at least flew over the Savannah River site so we could say, “Yes, that’s a great site.”
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Well, that was a tremendous amount of acreage.
DR. GLENNAN: Oh yes. I know. Well I guess that takes me to the point where I went back to Case.
MR. LARSON: What year was that that you went back to Case?
DR. GLENNAN: That was in November of 1952. I had told Mr. Truman that I could stay for only 18 months. I was on leave from Case. Well I did stay 25 months. I left the day before the first hydrogen explosion out in the Pacific.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: One of the highlights of my entire life was a meeting at Princeton. You must have heard of it. All of the highlights of, the great men of the atomic energy business, Fermi, Bradbury, Johnnie Wheeler, Teller, Oppenheimer, the whole crowd of them were there. For two days we listened to debates. At that point in time, it looked as though you were giving up more in the fission bomb to make one hydrogen bomb than it would be worth, but at that meeting Teller finally got the floor and he told of a new concept which Oppie said, “That’s a sweet concept. It’s much to be pursued.” Now this is in juxtaposition to his opposition earlier on to going ahead with the Supra as they called it.
MR. LARSON: That was a tremendous breakthrough and of course there has been some debate since then you might say who among, there was Teller, several others.
DR. GLENNAN: Stan Ulam…
MR. LARSON: Ulam.
DR. GLENNAN: …was really as much responsible as Teller, but Teller was certainly the salesman. In any event, I will never forget that meeting. I sat there and listened and listened, my eyes were like this, you know, and I finally asked Harry Smithe as we walked over to lunch, the meaning of a term that had been used by Teller and he gave me the meaning, and Clarence, I have never used that term since, and I have never heard it used nor seen it used.
MR. LARSON: I’ll be darn.
DR. GLENNAN: I’m not going to tell you what it is now.
MR. LARSON: Well that’s interesting.
DR. GLENNAN: I’m sure it has no real significance as a matter of classification now, but I still have that feel that is something I never want to talk about. I went back to Case and was there for about, let’s see, 1952 to 1958, six years when Jim Killian [sp?] called and said, “Will you come down? I want to talk with you about a post, an important post, the head of the space agency.” I said, “My God, Jim, I don’t quite understand. I don’t know anything about space. I don’t know which end of a rocket you light.”
MR. LARSON: Yes. Let’s see, by that time of course the Russians had launched Sputnik.
DR. GLENNAN: Sputnik, yes. I remember, you recall that now, October 4, 1957, when Sputnik went up. I was a member of the National Science Board at that time and our Vanguard program was being funded through the National Science Board. There were all the snide remarks about this Russian accomplishment, didn’t believe it, and all that sort of thing, just a grapefruit up there. I remember calling and sending a telegram to Alan Waterman saying they can’t be second in everything all the time. Send them a telegram that is fulsome and gives them the praise and the credit for having done this. They beat us to it, why don’t you acknowledge it. That’s the way I viewed that kind of international competition at that time. I went down to see Jim, he gave me the law which had been signed on July 29 of ’58, ’57, ’58. I read it with him and looked at it and said, “Here is one thing that’s going to be troublesome right away. We had to keep the military advised is what we were doing. It sounded very much like the old military liaison committee which gave us a lot of trouble in the AEC. Well I went over to see the next day with Jim, Mr. Eisenhower. I had met Mr. Eisenhower once before and I don’t think he remembered it, but I had been called back from a vacation to head one of the Taft-Hartly panel investigations when the Paducah plant was going on strike. We rendered a report in two or three days, interestingly enough John [inaudible] was a member of that panel and he later became a commissioner, but Mr. Eisenhower was very pleasant. I don’t really recall very much except that I became an admirer of him. I never left his office without the feeling that I had been in the presence of a truly great man and a man that I would serve to the death. It was a strange feeling that I had.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well he exuded leadership.
DR. GLENNAN: He was a true king. Yes. well the upshot was that I did go and take the job, sworn in on July 19 and went to work on August 9 and was there for 30 months. We built NASA on the ashes, if you will, of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. I had said that I would not take the job unless Hugh Driden would be my deputy. Hugh Driden was then the head, the director of NACA.
MR. LARSON: You were there at a time when Hugh Driden, wasn’t he in Cleveland? Was that one of…
DR. GLENNAN: No, he was in Washington.
MR. LARSON: But one of the big instillations was in Cleveland.
DR. GLENNAN: Louis Laboratory there. We had 8,000 people in NACA that Fall, three big laboratories, Langley, Ames out in Moffett field in California and Louis in Cleveland. We had two smaller laboratories, Wallops Island on the Virginia coast and the High Speed Flight Station out at Edwards field.
MR. LARSON: Fine. Well, fine. That was a fascinating, I was wondering if we might just take a little break here.
[Break in video]
DR. GLENNAN: Well, Hugh was one of God’s very, very fun people. He was wise. He was a fine scientist. He had a great reputation, internationally as well as in this country. We worked together quite well. Actually, I suppose we set that up as sort of an office of the administrator and there was Hugh and myself and I had insisted on an associate administrator. Everybody accuses me of carrying over the general manager concept form the commission on that and I guess it’s probably correct.
MR. LARSON: It worked very well.
DR. GLENNAN: It did work very well and it still is there. Only now I have more than one associate administrator. Imagine again going from Case where at that time I suppose my budget might have been $7 million. On the day I was sworn in, Hugh took me over to meet some of the staff at the Dolly Madison house which was our headquarters in those days. The newest agency in town, in the oldest house in town, and they put a budget in front of me for $615 million.
MR. LARSON: That was quite a…
DR. GLENNAN: I was flabbergasted. I said go ahead and that I think was pretty much the way we ran it from then on. We were conservative, yes. I found myself very much in tune with Mr. Eisenhower. I don’t recall Mr. Eisenhower ever telling me to do any particular thing. I saw Ike I suppose, once every three weeks and never waited more than a half a day to see him. He was very responsive. I recall one time when I was, I guess, a little fed up with the fact that every time you wanted to see the boss there was a [inaudible] or two or three others perhaps taking notes of what we were saying. Leaving a meeting one morning, I said to Tom Stephens, the appointment secretary, “Tom, does anybody ever see the boss alone? Without the note takers?” He says, “Why don’t you try?” I said, “All right. Set me up a date.” That afternoon I had an hour and a quarter with Mr. Eisenhower, by myself.
MR. LARSON: That’s an amazing story.
DR. GLENNAN: I went in and I said, “Mr. President, I don’t want anything except the opportunity just to chat with you. I want to tell you what I am thinking about, what the long range future looks like to me, I want to get some reactions that I think you ought to know where I’m trying to head this agency.” Within 15 minutes, Ike was up stomping around that room, cursing, “God damn, Glennan, we can’t let these monkeys get ahead of us that way.” He was not one who believed in a race with the Russians. He wanted to be able to put up a house into space and we had nothing that would move more than a few pounds. He was not a space cadet, nor was I. I thought that we had to push as fast as we could in the white hot light of the public interest in those days, I guess that’s still much that way, but not to the extent that we have it. We had to staff, develop a program, develop relationships with the Congress and the military, all of these things, and finish up the jobs that Herb York and ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency] had undertaken before NASA was brought into being. So it was a struggle every day and something new all the time, good people, great people. That’s one thing I would like to say in this session. I have made speeches about the quality of the people that I worked with in the government, at the AEC, at NASA and at the State Department. I have told industrialists, “You’d be proud to have anyone of those people on your staff.” The fact that they are labeled bureaucrats and all the rest of that is unfortunate, but that’s what happens when you get a big organization and it gets a little bit stagy and you get so many checks and balances that things don’t get done as rapidly as you would like to see them. Well, that’s not the fault of the eye on the firing line.
MR. LARSON: Of course you had the opportunity to be in two large very key agencies more or less at the early stages…
DR. GLENNAN: Exactly.
MR. LARSON: …when things were really happening and essentially the heavy hand of bureaucracy had not taken over in either one.
DR. GLENNAN: You’re quite right. You’re quite right and I will always be grateful for that. Well we, I suppose that in those days we might have tried six, seven shots a year, maybe get one of them that would work. It was simply because we had to use the boosters of the rockets that were available. They were for the most part military rockets that were just then being designed and built. Most of them hadn’t been rated as useful in combat or anything else, but we did start a long range program which finally ended up with a Saturn. That was, I called a meeting on the 19th of December. It’s strange how dates do stick in your mind, in 1958. I had been there about three months, four months and we invited all of the manufacturers and all of our laboratory people and all of the services. The services sort of didn’t want to come, but they did come. We started out then to lay out the Scout, which was a little pencil thin rocket that we used for launches down at Wallops Island, on up through the Nova, so-called, which was the big 20 foot bell rocket engine with a million and a half pound thrust. No one had ever built one. On February 5, I signed the contract for that, $105 million. Rocket-On took that on. Now that, Clarence, was in the February of 1959 and the rockets that used that engine, F-1 engine, didn’t fly for six years. That’s the kind of time scale you were on. I also ran into an interesting experience, a neophyte still in government because at the commission, Gordon Dean, he was a chairman, he did most of the testifying and we backed him up, but very seldom did I get into any debates on the Hill or get really to understand how the Hill and its staff worked. I had to learn that all very fast when I was the administrator and I found it to be an interesting and a very rewarding experience. My first real battle there was with Stu Symington who I thought was a, well, I didn’t have much respect for him. He had been head of Emerson Electric. He, when my legislative liaison man, Jim Gleeson took me up there to meet him, talk with him, he gave me a lecture on management. Well I thought I knew as much about management as he did and I excused myself as soon as I could, but then he was chairman of a subcommittee that was trying to figure out why we weren’t integrating our planning with the Air Force. I just had to say we just started. We don’t know what we have yet. We’re building an organization, all that sort of thing, but I went back from that meeting determined that we were going to have a long range plan. It took about a year. [Inaudible] Stuart was the man that I gave that job to and in about a year we had a ten year program and interestingly enough. With the exception of the Gemini and of course some of the science shots, everything that was flown up to the Apollo, up through the Apollo was in our ten year plan. Even the configuration of Apollo. George Lowe brought something into me in 1960. He had been up all night. He was unshaven. He didn’t have a necktie on, he apologized, and so I just took my necktie off and said, “Sit down. What you got?” He gave his concept of a three module package that would go to the moon, hadn’t decided whether it would be an earth orbit or a lunar orbit, that sort of thing, but those…
MR. LARSON: I was stressed to hear of his death the other day.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes. One of the finest men I ever knew. Had a great future ahead of him. He done, every job he ever took, he did to perfection. The last one at [inaudible] I don’t think anybody has made as great an impact on an institution, of a higher education in the five, six, seven years that he had there, as George has done. It’s a great loss to the country.
MR. LARSON: Incidentally, I mentioned George, did you, what is your recollection of Wernher Von Braun? His particular era.
DR. GLENNAN: Well, now we’re back up a little bit. As I looked at our capabilities, NACA had been active in sounding rockets and things of that sort and the Naval Research Laboratory people had come over with us with Vanguard, had that kind of experience. It just looked to me that we didn’t have the kind of moxy in the space vehicle business, the rocket booster business that we needed. So, in that first fall, 1958, probably two months after we had gotten into business, I said to Hugh, I’m going to try and get Von Braun’s team transferred to us. Hugh, a wise man, said, “I don’t know, Keith, that’s going to be a real battle and I’m not sure I would try that as early as this.” I said, “Hugh we must do everything we can to move this program ahead and work at the cutting edge of all the technologies and we don’t have people that understand that business as much as Von Braun and the people that he brought with him from Germany and were working with him then ABMA, Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama.” Well I certainly did learn. Hugh backed me up completely. He had had his say, I made the decision, he just supported me right straight through. I went over and talked with Neal McElroy and with Roy Johnson who was head of ARPA and with Herb York. They all agreed that this should be done. Then there was a chap by the name of Bill Holiday who was sort of an overseer of the ballistic missile program for the Defense Department at that time out of the secretary’s office and he thoroughly agreed that it should be done. You see, there was a dichotomy between the Army on the one side who was bucking for a big part in the ballistic missile game and the Air Force on the other side where you had the space technology laboratories and [inaudible] running those out there on the West Coast. It was just duplication, the Jupiter and the Thor, the Red Stone and something else. I secured the agreement with Neal McElroy and Don Quarrels who was Deputy Secretary of Defense at the time and they said, “Well maybe you better go down and talk with Wilbur Brecker, the Secretary of the Army.” Not really understanding, I had never met Mr. Brecker, what I was going to get into. I said, “All right.” Bill Holiday offered to go with me, thank God. We went down there and here is Mr. Brecker and to the side are Jack Henrick [sp?] and Arthur Tudo [sp?] Lieutenant Generals with stone faces, didn’t say a word throughout that entire discussion and I led off by telling Mr. Brecker what I thought we needed. We wanted really to…
[Break in audio]
DR. GLENNAN: …the continuation of the programs of the Army that the, that Von Braun’s team was active in, but we needed them to get on with the civilian space program. I could see him purse his lips as I kept talking and he finally said, “You couldn’t have them if you had all the guns in this Army. You’ll just try to split up the Von Braun team.” I said, “Mr. Brecker, I have no intention of splitting up anything. They have built a great reputation. They have accomplished a great many things. I don’t know Mr. Von Braun, but I would like the opportunity to talk with him and I think from what I have heard, he has a great deal of interest in space, in particularly in going to some of the other planets and going to the moon.” Well, it was a nasty talk for about a half an hour and I finally excused myself. The next morning, well later that night, I had a call from a reporter for the Cleveland [inaudible] telling me what was going to appear the next morning in the Baltimore Sun. I’ve forgotten the name of the military affairs reporter for the Sun, but when it came out, Clarence, it was word for word what had been said in that meeting.
MR. LARSON: Amazing.
DR. GLENNAN: Just word for word. I guess that was one of the few times I just hit the ceiling. I asked them for another meeting with Brecker, but I said, “Mr. Brecker, Secretary Brecker, I want to talk with you alone. I’m not going to have anybody with me and I don’t need any of your generals with you.” So he went in and sat down and I went through this again and he talked about splitting the team and I said, “Mr. Brecker, you know this is a common place thing in industry. You build a good team and then you split off a part of it to take on another important job and you really fertilize the breath and spectrum of a laboratory by splitting off chunks of teams that have worked well together.” He leaned across the desk at me, “You young whipper-snapper, you trying to tell me I don’t know how to run a laboratory?” Well, I was by that time, I guess a little more in control of myself and I just laughed at him and I said, “Mr. Brecker, I’m not trying to tell you anything. I’m just trying to get you to see that we would not really harm your ABMA team but we would get a lot done for this nation if we could have a portion of Von Braun’s people.” That ended that. I was out on the West Coast making a visit to Ames Laboratory when word came that the Army had decided to give us JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was a contractor to the Army, to the ABMA people. That seemed to me to make some sense. Hugh and I went out to see [Lee] Dubridge at Cal Tech which was suppose to be the overseer of the laboratory. Well I was surprised when Lee told me he hadn’t been out of the lab for three years. I’ve always characterized it this way. The Army who are good people, they knew enough to get very good people serving them. JPL had no peer in scientists active in this rocketry field and they worked with the Army well enough, because they could tell the Army what they were going to do and do it. Well, when they got over, when we finally took them over and I thought we just put them in with the Louis’ and the Ames’ and Langley’s, but it never quite worked that way. I guess it should have, but there wasn’t any management there. It was, Bill Pickering was a fine person, good leader, but not a manager, and I can remember when Neal and I went in, no, it wasn’t, yes, Neal McElroy and I went in with a paper we were going to sign and ask him to sign it as an executive order, transferring the JPL to NASA. I looked up and he said, “I thoroughly disagree with this. I think you ought to take ABMA now, but I will respect your having come to this conclusion.” A year later we did get Von Braun, but we got it on my terms, not on Mr. Brecker’s terms.
MR. LARSON: Well that’s a fascinating story there. A very important one.
DR. GLENNAN: Yeah, I think so.
MR. LARSON: That shows the difficulty in getting all these things together and getting all these things together was absolutely necessary for the ultimate success of the program.
DR. GLENNAN: I don’t suppose one should tell some of the less flattering sides of an operation such as this. [John] Medaris, General Medaris was head of ABMA and I think it’s worth telling this. He was a martinet. He had side boys outside of his office, all of them six foot three or more, white gloves and white pâtés and all of that. When he went around he had a swagger stick all the time. He was a real martinet. When we were in the final negotiations for ABMA, Von Braun in the fall of 1959, I went down to Huntsville to see some work on the big, on what they were then calling the Saturn, yes. It was going to be one big engine. No, it wasn’t either, it was going to use, I guess, it was a J engine, but a cluster of them, five of them as I recall it. But it was one that would finally take one big engine and become Saturn, Saturn-1. I rode around the reservation with Medaris and I noticed every place we stopped he ran in [inaudible]. Finally we were about two-thirds through the trip and he asked me to come to his office. I said, “Fine, I’ll chat with you.” When we sat down, he said, “Now Dr. Glennan, I know there is a move afoot to move Von Braun and good portion of his team out of here.” I said, “No, I don’t think it’s quite that way, but I really don’t know that much about it.” I had to play it a little bit dumb. He said, went on to say, “Their big project is the Saturn-1 and if you’ll give me your word that the Saturn-1 will be continued, I’ll go to Washington and advocate the transfer of the Von Braun group to NASA.” The legislation had run long enough then so that any transfer of that sort, which could have been made by just an executive order as was the case with JPL, had to be proposed to Congress and lay on the desk for 60 days and then be approved, unless they wanted to approve it earlier, the Congress. I went up to my friends on the Hill, the space committees in the Senate and the House and urged that decisions be taken ahead of the 60 days. We needed to get on with what we wanted to be doing. So they called a hearing and to my amazement, General Medaris went up there and opposed this after having told me this, that he was going to support it. Well, I was taken aback, but I wasn’t going to lose the ABMA, we just had to wait until the 60 days had run and that’s what happened. And as you know, he later became a priest. I think maybe his atoning for his…
MR. LARSON: That’s an amazing story. Well, that certainly clarifies all of these difficult decisions that had to be made during the early days of the space program.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes. I, just before I took that office I took a weeks’ vacation because I had to finish up a report for Case and I developed a philosophy that I wanted to use in guiding me. I have it all written out in a diary now, but one of the elements in it was that I was not going to Washington to add people to the federal payroll. When I showed this to some of my colleagues at NASA, they laughed at me. As I say, we went in with 8,000 of NASA people. We began bringing in JPL, some people from the Signal Corps and some people from the NRL, and finally the Von Braun group and when I left 30 months later, our roster was 18,000. We had gone up 10,000 but only 1,200 of them were new hires.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. So essentially it was just a consolidation of…
DR. GLENNAN: Yeah, gathering the people that really wanted to work in it, you see.
MR. LARSON: I can see the expansion of the program was a great task and a great accomplishment.
DR. GLENNAN: Well, I stayed on until our record became a little better. We had some successful flights and the engines were going into static tests and that sort of thing. I left on January 20, 1961 when Mr. Kennedy came in.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. In the meantime, there was the election and the new administration.
DR. GLENNAN: Then I went back again to Case.
MR. LARSON: Then you returned to Case. Well, fine. That’s a wonderful story of the origins of NASA and we all know what followed after that is well known in history.
DR. GLENNAN: Oh boy, I know.
MR. LARSON: So, well fine. Then how long did you stay at Case then.
DR. GLENNAN: I stayed at Case then until 1965. I had made up my mind when I first started at Case in 1947 that 10 years was long enough for any college president. I thought you would get stale on the job. I talked with people like John Mason at [inaudible] who quit at the end of five, or ten years and went to one of the colleges in Minnesota, I can’t recall.
MR. LARSON: Was it Carlton?
DR. GLENNAN: Carlton, yes. In any event I never was at Case for more than six years in any one consecutive span of years, because of these two trips down here. But I was getting to the point where some young faculty would come in and they would have some ideas and they sounded pretty good, but I would say, “Well that sounds like a pretty good idea, but we had the same problem six years ago and we did this, that, and the other thing, and it worked. Why don’t we just do that again?” Well when you start putting the lid on the bright young ones, you better get off. When you start going around the track the third time with the same thing, it’s time to get off. Ray [inaudible] accepted the post, but he withdrew six months later, or six weeks later and I stayed on half-time and went to AUI, the Associated University as president half-time and that was the worst decision I ever made. I thought, you know, I could work at Case one week, work at AUI the other week. Many weeks I made two round trips between Washington, we had moved to Washington, we were living in Washington. I had an apartment in New York. By March of 1966 I had had it, so I left and went full-time then with AUI where I stayed until ’68. I was not really a very good choice for AUI. I wasn’t enough of a scientist, Clarence. I was a manager. I had done very well with people, but not where I was dealing with a bunch of high-energy physicists that whom there are no more egotistical people in my…
MR. LARSON: That’s a well-known fact. Plus you have all those diverse universities who integrated.
DR. GLENNAN: I found working with the universities wasn’t too hard, but I tried to bring them in. I tried to have the presidents, I went to see each one of the presidents. Nobody had done that before. It was a sort of, why don’t we make something more of AUI, it’s done a wonderful job for the commission and the nation all these years and it has all the competence that could be used for other things. We did look at a tropical marine laboratory down in Puerto Rico, even got one U.S. Marine to set aside, I think it was 3,000 acres near [inaudible] for a tropical marine laboratory there. I think it would have been a great thing to be able to pull off, but it fell by the wayside and SF couldn’t fund it. Nobody else was going to do it, I guess. We also had as you know the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and, so I was working with NSF and the AEC and I moved the AUI to Washington where I thought the action was. I enjoyed those years, but not as much as I might have and I’m sure not with the great good will of several of the top staff.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well that’s right. It was some very difficult and as you say there were an awful lot of prima donnas to work with. You really had not had the experience with that before. In fact, nobody has experience to do that.
DR. GLENNAN: Yeah, well then I went immediately to work with John Gardener. This was at the time, you remember the riots here in Washington and all the rest of that and John started a thing called the Urban Coalition. He asked me to come and join him and I did and I worked with him for about a year and a half raising money for him to fund it for about two years of his work. Going out on the hostings and getting money from corporations. It was very easy, well, not very easy, but it was easy enough because everybody had the upmost respect for John and what he was trying to do. It was to bring all parties into a dialogue. I left that, and after about a year and a half, I was beginning to have trouble with what is known as peripheral neuropathy as a result of my being a diabetic, hard to walk around, increasingly hard and the first thing I know I get a call from [Glenn] Seaborg who is then chairman of the commission, asked me to come out and he wanted me to stand for the post of U.S. representative for the International Atomic Energy Agency.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: I remember Byron [inaudible] was the one who came in to brief me. I had never had much in the way of international experience, none in international diplomacy of course, but some in the time that I worked in England and on the continent, very early in my career. I finally decided that this might be something worthwhile. Harry Smithe was then the U.S. Representative had been for I think eight or nine years.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: So I went over for a June board meeting, just to see what was happening, what this was all about. Again, I was in a new business where I had no chance to do any of the dirty nitty-gritty with my hands and feel it, but I stayed there for three years. We did the safe guards.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes, that was a very important meeting.
DR. GLENNAN: You were at the commission at that time.
MR. LARSON: Let’s see. No, I didn’t join the commission…
DR. GLENNAN: That was 1970.
MR. LARSON: That’s right. Yes. Oh yes. I remember now because of your work on the safe guard. That’s what…
DR. GLENNAN: I came over and briefed you from time to time.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. GLENNAN: So that post held the personal rank of ambassador and I pretty well wound up my career when I finished off there, although I kept working with Herman Polick [sp?] as a consultant at state, went back to Russia a couple of times.
MR. LARSON: Yes, in fact I accompanied you on one of the trips to Russia.
DR. GLENNAN: Oh yes. I remember now, but it’s been a full career, quite full life, very satisfying.
MR. LARSON: There is an amazing diversity in your career. It started so many things.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes.
MR. LARSON: That’s always, there is a great deal of satisfaction in the new challenges that must have come along every time.
DR. GLENNAN: People often ask me with a diverse set of experiences such as you’ve had, which really gave you the most satisfaction? Strangely enough it was the academic experience.
MR. LARSON: That’s very interesting.
DR. GLENNAN: Going in there with a bachelor’s degree, nothing more, never having taught a day in my life, really except for that unfortunate experience as a substitute teacher in a high school room, but to go in there and greet incoming freshman with their mothers and fathers, they’re a little bit shy about leaving these kids. They didn’t know that they could make it, you know, the experiences that they were going to be subjected to. Then four years later these kids walking across that platform, grabbed the diploma, they were going out to meet the world and that is really a great, great satisfaction to have played a small part in that. We did rebuild Case. We did make it into one of the best institutes of technology in the country I believe during my tenure there.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. It’s has a tremendous reputation now. So it must be a great deal of satisfaction that you had the opportunity to shape that into something which was quite small into a powerhouse that it is today. Well, I was wondering if there were any other points as you look back that you wanted to mention. I wanted to perhaps, this is going back a little bit, but during your stint with the AEC of course you started a much better cooperation with industry, particularly in getting started, the reactor business. Wasn’t the Atomic Energy Industrial Forum started as a result of your efforts?
DR. GLENNAN: Yes, I think so. I left the commission on October 31, I guess it was, 1952, and on the 25th of November of that year I made a speech to the Manufacturing Chemists Association. I had been talking with Oliver Townsend who was Gordon Dean’s assistant speech writer. Oliver had helped me with two or three speeches. As a matter of fact, throughout my life I’ve written almost all my own speeches. I just somehow or other, couldn’t say what other people said for me, but Oliver was better than that. He took about 20 of my speeches, got the nuances, the way I expressed myself, that sort of thing, he did a very good job and we did put together a speech which was called for the initiation of an Atomic Industrial Forum. Before the Manufacturing Chemists Association meeting, I and sometimes with Ollie, went to see Ralph [inaudible] at GE, Alfred Wittles [sp?] at Babcock-Wilcox, [inaudible] at Westinghouse, and finally wound up, there were two or three others, they all thought I, I would sit there and let them read the speech and ask them if they would participate. They would all participate, but they wouldn’t take the lead. I had come to know Walker [inaudible] out at Detroit-Edison and he invited us out when we called. So Ollie and I went out there, found Walker holed up in his office. He was in the midst of a strike. He was living in his office, but he gave us a half a day to do this thing, and he said, “Why, of course, I’ll do it.” Within weeks really, he had called together two or three meetings of industrial people, particularly those who were interested in building reactors and the larger utilities. So the Forum was born. I had chosen the name Forum because I was not interested in having another lobbying group.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. GLENNAN: While the Forum now is a lobbying group, for many, many years it stayed off that and simply tried to help understanding between industry and the AEC.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well it had quite a different mission at that period of time.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes.
MR. LARSON: It was carried out very effectively.
DR. GLENNAN: I think so. It’s a satisfaction to see it still operating and doing very good…
[End of Interview]

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PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. KEITH GLENNAN
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
May 14, 1985
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
DR. GLENNAN: Well we have to go back quite a ways now since my wife and I had our 50th wedding anniversary just three years ago, but I can remember a little bit about what happened to me except that I don’t recall being born. I was born in Enderlin, North Dakota. My father was a train dispatcher at the head of the rails. Head of the rails meaning the railroad was being built to the west and we lived in a boxcar and moved with the laying of the rails and he set up his office in the boxcar of course. My childhood was spent pretty much in Montana, the first seven years out in Three Forks, Montana, right in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Then Dad was, I guess he was a night truck dispatcher there and decided he wanted to come back east and he went back to the Chicago and Northwestern and we lived in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. There I went through my elementary and secondary school and I was going to be a teacher, strangely enough.
MR. LARSON: What subjects were you particularly interested in?
DR. GLENNAN: Well, I was interested in math. I just took a lot of math and unfortunately I learned everything by rote. I didn’t understand how you derived the equation or used to be the, used mathematics sensibly. I did very well. I got A’s all the way through, but after I had been there in this teacher training college for about six months I suppose, I was asked to go back to my old high school and do a substitute job. I did it for three days. Now I was a kid.
MR. LARSON: What subject did you substitute in?
DR. GLENNAN: It was in geometry, plain geometry. I guess the problem was the kids were older than I and they took advantage of me. I decided right then and there that maintaining discipline in the classroom was not going to be the rest of my life work. So I said, I’m going on to college. My family, I had a brother and a sister, brother older, sister younger and nobody in the family had ever go beyond high school. My father had only gone through the fourth grade. So this was a new experience.
MR. LARSON: Of course that was very common back in the early part of the century. It was a little bit unusual even to go to college.
DR. GLENNAN: Very unusual. I think only 10 percent of the age group got to college when I went there in 1924. Well, in any event, I did find a way to get into college through the very great help of a friend of mine who lived in Eau Claire, the son of a Norwegian doctor. He was at Yale as a freshman while I was finishing my second year at Eau Claire State Normal School. He convinced me I should try to, I should send in an application. Well, I got the application back and it said, “No.” Pete went to the registrar and said, “I think you’re making a mistake, Mr. Registrar. Yale would be very good for Glennan and Glennan will be very good for Yale.” Well that did the trick. I received a letter somewhat later saying if I could come to New Haven for an interview they would reconsider my case.
MR. LARSON: Yes. As I remember at that time, at least in my experience, in order to get into Yale or Harvard it was almost mandatory that you go to a special preparatory school.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes, and the SATs were just coming in at that time. I didn’t do any of that, but I went down to New Haven. My father, I got a job driving a lady to New York. I was at the time working in a clothing store in the afternoon and she came in and she said, “Keith, do you know where I can find somebody who can drive me to New York?” I said, “Well, if you’ll just wait a minute, I’ll go look.” I went upstairs to the office and I quit. I came back and I said, “I’m your man.” Well we had a Cadillac ’57 as I recall it and we went across the Lincoln trail, Lincoln Road, whatever we called it at that time and stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria. I remember going into New York. I had stopped to let somebody go across the street and a cop called out to me. “Hey, farmer, run into them. They’ll get out of your way.” Well, I went up to New Haven and finally was accepted with a condition in surveying. We had a summer course in surveying. Well, I hit that and I was there as a sophomore. They gave me credit for two years.
MR. LARSON: Well good.
DR. GLENNAN: I took electrical engineering because all of my family were in the railroad business and at that particular time in history, the railroads were electrifying from New York to New Haven and Hartford to Pennsylvania, Milwaukee to where we lived out in Three Forks, Montana, was in the midst of an electrification program. I said, “I’m going to be a railroad man. I better take electrical engineering.” I did. I remember I had had college physics so-called in this teachers training college and I had, kept very fine notebooks. Oh, they were just right, up to snuff. When I went in there I went up to see the head of the physics department, Sheffield Scientific School as it was then known. He wouldn’t give me credit for any of it. He said, “No, you’ll take freshman physics here.” I went to the dean and the dean says, “You know those scientists. They think nothing is very important unless it has a tag science on it. We’ll give you…” I had told him that I was interested in people. How did you get things done through other people and I wanted to understand something about personnel administration and economics and that sort of thing. He was very understanding, Dean Warren. So I was given a C in physics and I’ve regretted it ever since, Clarence. I don’t know enough about physics to fill a thimble and it’s been a very sincere regret of mine all my life.
MR. LARSON: Well you’ve hidden that deficiency very well because you’ve always seemed to talk authoritatively on applications of physics.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes, well one has to do that. You know you have to stay ahead of the crowd. While there I got a job. I went there with $250 I had saved. My first bill was $350. I decided that I just had to go to work. So I went out manicuring lawns, and selling clothes. I got one suit. The twelfth suit that I sold was mine. I was one of the better dressed men on that campus. But finally, I had a letter from a high school teacher of mine to a professor, Professor Adams, who was a distinguished professor of economics at Yale. I went to see him when I finally found that I couldn’t make it and he looked at me. He was a very distinguished looking man and he finally gotten to the fact that I was looking for a job. He said, “Can you drive?” I said, “Well, I’ve driven summers for the last couple of years.” “All right, I’ll buy a car,” says he. I was aghast, and he said, “Well maybe I should have you go out and see Mrs. Adams first.” So that day I think I took my last dollar and bought myself a pair of Plus Fours , those were all the rage in those days. This was 1924, and got on a street car the next day and went out and saw Mrs. Adams, but as I walked into the house, it was a modest house, in a entry hall there was a baby grand piano, and there was a girl with a very peculiar hair-do who was the younger daughter of the family, Ruth, and she is now my wife.
MR. LARSON: That is a remarkable story. Really is.
DR. GLENNAN: I drove for the rest of those three years while I was in college and lived part-time with the Adams, that is I took dinner with them every night. I had a room there if I wanted it. I got to know a good many of their friends and I think that my time with the Adams was much more important to me. I learned more about life and how you get things done and how you behave, if you will, than I did at Yale. Believe me. So they had a friend by the name of Wilcox who was with Westinghouse, I believe, yes, and he’d been involved in the very first days of talking motion pictures. This was in the days of Vitafilm. Warner Brothers was the originator of that term and when I was about to graduate, I asked him if there was any chance for me to get into that. I had had an offer from the Pennsylvania Railroad, so I was going to make my railroad career, but I think they were going to pay me $18 a week or something like that and I had to pay some debts because I was in debt when I got out of school. He gave me an opportunity to use my Easter vacation to try it out. I went out to Chicago and worked there for about 10 days and learned something about what I was getting into and was excited by it. Of course this was a new business.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: Absolutely a new business.
MR. LARSON: About what year was that?
DR. GLENNAN: That was in 1927, the spring of 1927. And the first talkie on Broadway had been shown August 26, 1926, short subjects. [Giovanni] Martinelli I recall and Will Hayes who was then the director, the job that Jack Valenti now has, the Motion Picture Association. Well, I’ll skip over a little bit here because I could go on for hours on this, but I did go to work for them five days after I graduated and I was being paid $35 a week.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: No overtime, nothing like that. I reported on Monday morning in New York and at 11 o’clock, I was on my way to Philadelphia. And Clarence, I got to bed on Friday night of that week, we worked right around the clock, maybe snatching an hour on the rug in the foyer or something like that, but when I finally went out to dinner on Friday night, I fell asleep in the soup. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: That’s a remarkable story. That certainly required a concentration of effort in order to get those things done.
DR. GLENNAN: Well this was exciting and I was sent all around this country, Chicago, Sacramento, and then up to Seattle, where for about six or seven months I was a service engineer. Now I didn’t know a vacuum tube from a light bulb. At Yale, in those days in the undergraduate school, you’ve got no vacuum tube theory, nothing of that sort. You had to be in the graduate school.
MR. LARSON: That’s amazing.
DR. GLENNAN: So I didn’t know how to read a circuit, but I found that the practical use of a hammer and a wrench and a screwdriver, you could fix most of the problems that occurred. I was shipped from Seattle, where by the way I found two of those proverbial five real friends that one finds in one’s life, two of them. They were great friends. They are both gone now, but my, what fun that was. I was a man of mystery. We locked the projection room door so that even the owner of the theater couldn’t get into it. We made it so mysterious how this sound worked.
MR. LARSON: Of course most people can’t remember, they aren’t old enough what a sensation talking pictures made when they came out. It really changed people’s lives. It was a great social phenomenon that most people take for granted now.
DR. GLENNAN: On that comment, Clarence, I certainly felt during the war when I was in this business, that we were really contributing by providing entertainment at a very low cost to people who had literally nothing. They couldn’t drive. They didn’t have any other means of entertainment. They flocked to the theaters. They cost very little, so we felt that we were keeping the morale up anyway. Then to Los Angeles, where I got into the first steps of management and about six months later I was asked to go to Europe. I went to London in August of 1928 and was there for about 19 months, during which time I learned something about my wife, Ruth Adams. She came over on leave for summer courses, I think, eating chocolate and learning a little French, down in Geneva. I met her at the boat, didn’t think about flying then, although we flew across the Channel, that sort of thing, but flying the oceans wasn’t being done then. I had envisioned having her come down the gang plank into my arms and she came down [moves arms wildly]. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Very formal. (Laughter)
DR. GLENNAN: Well, then, after I came back to this country then in 1930 and was made division superintendent with a base in Washington, was here for about 12, nine months. My territory ran from Baltimore down to New Orleans. I had about 700 theaters and five branch offices with about 35 men, so I was beginning to put into practice that which I had told Dean Warren I really wanted to do, get the job done through somebody else. ’31, Ruth and I were married back in New Haven. I was then taken back to the New York office where I was asked to start an educational film exchange. ERPI at that time, that was the name of the firm with which I was associated, Electrical Research Products, Incorporated, a fully owned subsidiary of Western Electric Company. They asked me then, but I made several changes. It was interesting because each of them were starting something new, and that is characteristic of my life as you will see going on through, but they asked me to go out to the old Edison Studios in the Bronx. Thomas Edison had had a studio named Edison Studios in the Bronx and I became general manager of this sound recording, lights, cameras, and all of that. We rented the stage, provided all the equipment. A man came in with some money we hoped and with his cast and director and he produced the picture. I remember we did a continuing news reel there with Graham McNamee as the announcer.
MR. LARSON: A grand old man.
DR. GLENNAN: I should say. Well that went on for, I suppose, nine months or a year. We re-equipped the studio during that time, and then Paramount was a creditor of ERPI and they had a big studio over on Long Island, the Astoria Studios. We took those over for the bad debts and I became vice president and general manager of that. Now this was in 1931. I was 26 years old, something like that. We made Emperor Jones there, I remember, with Paul Robeson. It was a fascinating thing to be introduced to the motion pictures in that way. I was responsible for managing the studio, providing the crews, cameramen and all the rest of that, carpenters, make-up artists, that type of thing.
MR. LARSON: I believe that is one of the classics of all time, Emperor Jones with Robeson.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes, I think it is. It was a great picture. Then ERPI asked me to go to the West Coast and take a look at a problem they had out there very much like the Paramount problem, at Metropolitan Studios where the Christie Comedies were made. You’re old enough to remember the Christie Comedies and they were in debt to ERPI for quite a bit of money, would I go out and take a look at it? I said, “Well, I’m just about to go on a holiday with my wife.” He says, “Well, go out through the Canal.” So we took a trip through the Canal and on the way out the Volstead Act was cancelled. So we were on the boat and did we enjoy that evening when everybody was, I think, well-oiled before we landed. In any event, I recommended we take it over and we make a service studio out of that. I was then asked to go out there and asked to be vice president and general manager of that. A man by the name of [inaudible] Rothecker [sp?] was going to be the president. He would go out and sell the stuff and I would provide the management hiring crews, really the operating part of the studio is my responsibility. From there, Clarence, I was there a year and a half perhaps, about that, no, just about a year and the first president of ERPI became the president of Paramount. He was out there and he came over to see me and asked if I would come over and consult in the operations of the Paramount Studios out there. Well in three months I became operations manager for Paramount. That went on for about five years. The last two of which I was studio manager of Paramount and then I was fired. There is no coming-of-age in the picture business until you’re fired.
MR. LARSON: That’s absolutely, it’s almost like university presidents. They last very long in that business.
DR. GLENNAN: That’s right. This is all a part of the business. I had the first engineering department in Hollywood. I wanted to apply, what to me, were some management techniques to the scheduling of the making of a picture, got a couple of people, directors to go along with it. We precut the picture before it was shot. That should have saved a good bit of money and it did. We didn’t have so much film to throw away, but the, I think that got a little bit rich for the general manager’s blood and he called me in one day and he said, “You know Keith, things aren’t going well.” I said, “I know very well that they aren’t going well.” He said, “Well we would like to have you leave.” I said, “I’ll leave right now. I’ll go cut my books and get out of the office.” “Well, we want to pay you something.” I said that I would not take the settlement. They finally paid me four months’ salary and that, an interesting thing, I was earning at that time more than I earned for the next 16 years.
MR. LARSON: That’s amazing.
DR. GLENNAN: It wasn’t all that much, but it looked like a lot to me. We had by that time three children and I went over to Lockheed. I had known again, through Ruth’s father, Bob Gross, the president of Lockheed and he gave me a job. Well, I didn’t know anything about airplanes or how you made them or anything like that, but I was there for about seven months and it was strange. I lived over in Bel Air at that time. 7:30 was the starting time and I had to go about a mile to get there. I really changed my way of life. I lasted for about six months in that and finally said they don’t know how to manage this thing. I don’t know much about airplanes. I don’t think this is the place for me and I went into see Mr. Gross. I said, “I’m resigning, Bob, but in resigning, I would like to tell you what I think is wrong at Vega.” This was the Vega Ventura was the plane that was being built at that time, was to say the paperwork on it weighed more than the plane did. In any event, Bob listened to me for a couple of hours and he said, “Keith, you just wait. On Thursday next, Cortland will be back.” Cortland was Bob’s brother and was the manager, general manager, vice president, whatever it was of the Vega subsidiary. Well that meeting never took place. I went in the following Saturday with my resignation to give to the general manager of the Vega plant and found that they had my check ready. So we met in the middle. I went back. I had already been asked to go to Sam Goldwyn, as studio manager there. I was there for about a year and half until the war started.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: Do you remember Vern Newtson by chance? He was an acoustician.
MR. LARSON: Oh, the name is very familiar. In fact isn’t there something about a Newtson effect or something like that.
DR. GLENNAN: Probably. In any event, he was running, the early days of the San Diego submarine warfare laboratory and Timothy Shay, Tim Shay with whom I had worked at ERPI, was working with the Columbia University division of war research under Dean Piegram, whom you did know.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: I had a little trouble getting through to Vern Newtson, I hadn’t known him, but I went down to see him and I called Tim and I said, “Can you give me some help, Tim? I want to get into this war.” I was in, this would have been, I was 35 years old. I was a little bit beyond draft age. Tim says, “Wait, I’m coming out next Saturday.” So I met him at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, he said, “Well go right on Keith. I’ll help you all I can here. Well, why don’t you come back and work for me?” “Well, what’s that?” “Well we have the US Navy underwater sound laboratory in New London, Connecticut. We are just starting it from scratch.” I said, “Sure.” So by this time we were flying across and I went back with him on Monday, came back on Tuesday and was at work a week later in New London, leaving Ruth to move the family back.
MR. LARSON: Well, that was a quite a change and of course it was extremely important with regard to minimizing submarine losses.
DR. GLENNAN: Yeah. Well, going on now. We went through the war. The laboratory was quite successful. I applied, interestingly enough, some of the techniques I had learned in Hollywood. We had an exhibit room when the Admirals came in. We had boards with cut outs and miniatures of the various devices we were working on so we could give them a real sales talk, and we designed and built what is known as the radio sonavoy [sp?]. So, far as I can remember, there were nine German submarines that were killed using those sonavoys to find them, dropping acoustic ordinances on them, at that point. Well, three years go by and I then went to Binghamton, New York, with Ansco, part of the Agfa film business which was in the Aniline property custodians hands. I was told it was going to be sold by the government in six months. Well I guess it was six years later before anything like that happened.
MR. LARSON: It takes a long time for that stuff…
DR. GLENNAN: But I did a variety of things. I was the head of a 400 man engineering department for a time, ran a camera plant that I never knew how to put a camera together, but I found out and worked in the film plant for a time, but I was a little bit tired. I was looking for something else. We were going to have a reunion of our laboratory staff in New York and Vannevar Bush was coming to be the speaker of the evening. I was going to see a man by the name of Bill Snow who had been on our staff in New London, former Bell Labs man, and it turned out that he wanted me to meet somebody from Oak Ridge. Now we’re getting close to the nuclear business and it was the head of Kellex, Kellogg, Kellex and we discussed the job of engineer manager or something as that. I thought it was way over my head, but I listened. In that same two days, one of my former laboratory associates from Cleveland asked me to meet him and I met him at the Yale Club for breakfast and he said, “Keith, how would you like to be a college president?” (Laughter) I said, “Chuck, I would love it I guess, but it isn’t done that way. Come on tell me more.” Well he was a graduate of Case. He had been with me for three years in New London and he had put my name in the pot when they were looking for a president. Over the next few weeks or months I made trips out there and had trustees ask me, “How would you go about raising money?” I said, “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never raised a nickel in my life.” And the fine old chairman of the board, Frank Quail came in for one of these meetings, said, “What kind of speeches do you make, Mr. Glennan?” I said, “I don’t know. I never made one.” Well they somehow or other agreed they couldn’t miss by very much because Case had been somewhat decimated during the war. With the exception of the metallurgy and the chemical engineering groups, the faculty had gone to the laboratories like the radiation laboratory in, if I remember, Bob Shacklen [sp?] was in charge of the acoustic measurements laboratory for CUDWR [Columbia University Division of War Research].
MR. LARSON: That was a problem common to many colleges and universities after the war because they never came back, including myself. I was a college professor who never came back.
DR. GLENNAN: Is that right? (Laughter) Well, Ruthie and I talked about this. She came from an academic family of course. I had none of that background, therefore I say three years essentially living with that family, Professor Adams and his wife, stood me in good stead. Ruthie and I use to talk about making our pile and starting a boys’ school. Well I finally didn’t make the pile, but I got the boys’ school because Case at that time was a male-only school. I went there in 1947, in August and then in 19… well I thought about what I should do. I didn’t know what a faculty looked like, how they acted, what their prerogatives were, how they were organized. I thought the thing to do is get them busy. So I went to Syracuse and saw Bill Tolley there who had had what he called a self-survey made at Syracuse when he went to Syracuse as president, chancellor. So I proposed this to the board out in Cleveland and they were a little bit non-committal on it, but I went ahead anyway. I thought maybe we could get this done in maybe six weeks, I mean in six months. It took two full years. I found there the dichotomy between the scientist and the engineer: they’re absolute, fairly absolute ignoring of the social sciences and the softer sciences. Well we did manage to bring the engineers and scientists together. I would have a curriculum say in the metallurgy department looked at by a man from the history department and a man from the chemistry department and a man from the metallurgy department. We began to get them even to going to lunch together.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. A great step it was.
DR. GLENNAN: It was a fascinating experience. Case had been Dayton Miller’s home base, you know, and Bob Shacklen was the head of the physics department, had been a student of his and had been a student of Arthur Compton’s out of Chicago. Bob had built a 30 rev betatron, the only one in the United States that didn’t have any federal dollars in it.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: Well, we thought we ought to celebrate that when we got a beam. I said lets strike out high and I tried to get Dave Lilienthal to come up and dedicate this. Well Lilienthal was busy, but he sent Louis Straws and that is where I first came to know Louis. We spent, I suppose, four or five hours together. Louis, as you know, is a fascinating set of paradoxes in some way. His, he was a gentleman through and through and I don’t know of anybody that was more patriotic in his own way than Louis. He was leaving the commission shortly thereafter and he recommended me for his replacement. I remember that. I had taken the family out west in 1950, driven across the country, six of us by that time and coming back, we stopped overnight in Indianapolis and there was a telephone. I called in, rather, I found that there was a telephone call from the White House. Well, I said that’s peculiar. I don’t know anybody at the White House, but I’ll call. I called and it was a chap who was down at the White House for the summer helping Donald Dawson recruit people for particular jobs in the administration and I laughed at him. He wanted to know whether I would be, allow my name to be put in for a candidate for a commissionership in the AEC. I hardly knew what AEC meant frankly.
MR. LARSON: Let’s see. What year was that?
DR. GLENNAN: That was in 1950. It would have been probably in June or July of 1950 and he kept me talking and I finally said, “Well, look if you’re serious about this, who am I to refuse to listen. So yes, I will listen.” I went on home, told my board something about this, talked it over with two or three other people there. I said I don’t think anything will ever come of it, but it’s interesting that this call came to me. Well it wasn’t too long before Don Dawson called me to come down on a Monday to see the President. Well, here is a little farmer boy running an institution which at that time probably had a budget of $3 million, all in, construction and everything else, and looking at the AEC which I learned had some astronomical figures in its budget. I had never read the act. I didn’t understand anything about it, but I went to Washington and I saw several good friends there. Their names sort of escape me at the moment, Quarrels, Don Quarrels, no, Don was later on. I just don’t remember them. In any event, he only encouraged me to think seriously about this and finally I had let Mr. Dawson know where I was staying and he could reach me there. He called me in and we talked about it for quite a while. Then he began giving me a lecture about patriotism and finally I got a little bit irked I said, “Mr. Dawson, I don’t think I need any lecture from you on patriotism. I’m running an institution known as Case Institute of Technology and we are trying to turn it out as fine a class of patriotism as you can find in this country.” Well he backed off and I said, “I’m going back to the hotel. You can get me if you want.” He said, “Wait a minute, Mr. Glennan, I think the President wants to see you.” So I sat back down. I was ushered into Mr. Truman’s office. People have asked me, “What was your impression of Mr. Truman?” I honestly couldn’t have given you an impression of Mr. Truman. I was the farmer boy looking into the Oval Office and there was the President of the United States. I was in complete awe I guess, but at least I said, “Good morning, Mr. President.” I didn’t say, “Good morning, Mr. Truman.” Well, he had me sit down and he talked with me very seriously for perhaps ten minutes telling me about the work of the Atomic Energy Commission, about his great interest in the peaceful uses of it, but he did not minimize the necessity for getting on with the weapons work or other. Then he finally said, I said very little in this, and I responded to questions. He said, “I don’t know that I’m going to offer you this post, Mr. Glennan, but I think I want to. I want you to go and see Gordon Dean, the new chairman of the commission and then I will let you know and I hope you will not keep me waiting with an answer.” So I said, “Well, Mr. President, I am flattered and a little dumbfounded. I don’t think you could have found a person less qualified for this job if you had scrapped the bottom of every barrel in the room.” I will never forget his smile as he said, “Mr. Glennan, I’m not sure you’re the best judge of that.”
MR. LARSON: That’s a very astute character, Mr. Truman.
DR. GLENNAN: I went and saw Gordon Dean, liked him. I met Harry Smithe for the first time and the rest of the commission was Sumner Pick and Tom Murray. Harold Wilson had been there as the general manager. Oh, I called Vannevar Bush to seek his advice on taking a post such as this. I said, “Van, you know me. You know what little I know.” He said, “Well you did a pretty good job. I think you ought to go see Carol Wilson. Make up your mind after you’ve talked with him, because he’s in the operating end and that’s the fort that you will be holding than almost anything else.” So I did go to see Carol Wilson. I first saw Dean again and he said, “I don’t know if it’s important that you see Carol Wilson. He is leaving.” He had resigned. He felt that the commissioners were getting into management too much and he told me all about this. I went and saw him and he told me all about this, but in any event, I did decide that I couldn’t refuse this request. I went back home, got things straightened out back there and reported on October 1. My first impressions included a few strange things. I suppose I was there for two weeks before any commissioner came into my office to say hello or have a cup of coffee with me. I finally asked General McCormick, who is then Colonel McCormick, head of the military Paris liaison, that group, about this, and he said, “Oh, I think you’re just a little bit touchy on that,” and he arranged for me to meet with a couple of the commissioners. We had lunch together and began to know each other. The first question asked of me by the staff was what kind of a car do you want? I said, “I don’t want a car. I came down here to go to work.” They said, “Well, you’re entitled to a car and a driver.” I said, “Forget it. I have my own car.” Well about two months later, I was quite willing to take that car and driver because I found I was, had to use the time going back and forth home reading, catching up with the paperwork that came across that desk.
MR. LARSON: Not to mention all of the parking time that was necessary, shuffling between Congress, various offices, military and so on.
DR. GLENNAN: You’re quite right about that. Then I asked Joe Valpea [sp?] who was our general council if I couldn’t meet Dave Lilienthal, and Joe did arrange a luncheon. I will never forget that. We had the ususal chit-chat and finally I said, “Mr. Lilienthal, as you know I am the newest and youngest commissioner there. What advice do you have for a commissioner?” He said, “Go home.” He was dedicated then to the single commissioner head of the agency, rather than the five commissioners. Well that was a shock. I learned…
MR. LARSON: I would imagine that would be a shock.
DR. GLENNAN: I learned something about it from him. I also found that I was startled. I went right into the meetings. Nobody said don’t participate for a while, just watch. I was eager, willing to do any work that had to be done, but you may recall, they had a big room where you were in posh quarters; I was still down on Constitution Avenue.
MR. LARSON: Commissioners always have nice meeting rooms.
DR. GLENNAN: But about 30 or 40 staff members sat in that room throughout every commission meeting. The commissioners didn’t meet together to talk about what they were going to discuss and I was just startled that that kind of thing could go on. You couldn’t be quite as frank as you wanted to be with the staff there. You know how that would…
MR. LARSON: Not with 30 staff, no.
DR. GLENNAN: So I finally asked for a meeting of the commission and the general manager and I said, “I just think it is wrong to go in there and be debating something in which there may be deep divisions, but divisions that you won’t quite say what you wish you could say, because you got that staff sitting out there.” Well, we finally decided that we would take Tuesday afternoons, I guess, and that we would have a commission seminar of our own, the five commissioners, the general manager and the general council and I guess that practice was continued for a very long time. Well, it made a lot of difference in the commission meetings then because we would beat our heads against each other. I can remember Tom Murray calling me names in there. He wouldn’t have done that in the commission meeting and I think it was a useful exercise. We had the usual debates, what particular aspect of the commission’s business would you assign to each man. We decided you don’t assign it to each man, but we began to settle into areas where we were really interested. I was interested along with Harry Smithe, we became very fast friends, in the operation of the laboratories. I was interested in the possibility for nuclear power someplace down the road. I was interested in how the organization was put together. You can see that I was not the scientist. We went on in those days; we were really in a very rapid buildup stage.
MR. LARSON: Yes. I remember some great decisions on thermonuclear weapons, I believe, and the buildup had started.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes. K-25, K-27, Paducah and Portsmouth were all started while I happened to be there.
MR. LARSON: Savannah River was…
DR. GLENNAN: Savannah River, my gracious. I got to know Walter Williams and have the greatest of respect for him. Our general manager was Marion [inaudible]. He was a fine person. He came from SO [Standard Oil], New Jersey Standard at that time. We didn’t have that, there was a new era of design for weapons. The weapons were being changed and some of them were being reworked. There weren’t that many of them in those days, but I learned something about the whole business, one could say. While I was there remembering how lost I felt and how stupid I felt in those first meetings of the commission, when Gene Zuckert [sp?] came over to replace Sumner Pick. He came over from the Air Force. I didn’t know Gene, but I got to know him quickly and I suggested to Gene that he go to the commission meetings, but not take part, don’t vote, doesn’t make any difference if there are four men voting or five. Let me set up a training schedule for you. For three months he would go one week he’d have sessions with the production people in Washington, then he would go out for another week and visit all the plants that were being built. He’d have a week with the weapons people and then he would go out to Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, etc. I think when he finally got into the real swing of it, he was better than any other commissioner had been, to take a responsible part. We went on, I stayed until, well, there was one other fascinating experience. Oh, there are many. I got to know Edward Teller. I got to know Ernest Lawrence, Gene Wigner, the great names in the business. Strangely enough almost from the beginning I never could agree with Edward Teller. He was going to kill every Russian and have more bombs than anybody else in the world. I just couldn’t buy that. We didn’t have any open debates, but it was an interesting experience to listen to Edward. He was a salesman par excellence, of course with those great flashing eyebrows of his, you know. We went through at that time, the building of a great vacuum chamber out at Livermore. This was before the Livermore Laboratory had started. That seemed to be a waste of time, but it turned out later to be a waste of time, except that we learned something about vacuum pumps at that time.
MR. LARSON: Yes. Well that was a big project that certainly was ill advised, but there was a lot of progress made.
DR. GLENNAN: Oh, my gracious. We were worrying about materials, raw materials. Jessie Johnson was head of the raw materials division for many, many years after that too. But I give Tom Murray credit for pushing the raw materials program and for pushing the big computer program, without which we wouldn’t have had as early a success for the hydrogen bomb as we did. Tom was a very devout Catholic, went to mass every morning before he came to the commission. He was not an easy person to be with, but I remember years later when I, he was retiring from the commission, I wrote him a letter in which I said, “I certainly give you all the credit for putting us in a better position with respect to raw materials and with respect to computing power,” and he wrote me back the nicest letter. I was awfully glad I had done that. This takes us, I guess, I have mentioned the fact that we have started all this construction activity. Incidentally you spoke of the Savannah River plant. We were going to take that site and it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard anybody describe it. So I asked about it and sure enough nobody had been down there. Harry Smithe and I got a plane from the Air Force and flew down there on a Sunday and at least flew over the Savannah River site so we could say, “Yes, that’s a great site.”
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Well, that was a tremendous amount of acreage.
DR. GLENNAN: Oh yes. I know. Well I guess that takes me to the point where I went back to Case.
MR. LARSON: What year was that that you went back to Case?
DR. GLENNAN: That was in November of 1952. I had told Mr. Truman that I could stay for only 18 months. I was on leave from Case. Well I did stay 25 months. I left the day before the first hydrogen explosion out in the Pacific.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: One of the highlights of my entire life was a meeting at Princeton. You must have heard of it. All of the highlights of, the great men of the atomic energy business, Fermi, Bradbury, Johnnie Wheeler, Teller, Oppenheimer, the whole crowd of them were there. For two days we listened to debates. At that point in time, it looked as though you were giving up more in the fission bomb to make one hydrogen bomb than it would be worth, but at that meeting Teller finally got the floor and he told of a new concept which Oppie said, “That’s a sweet concept. It’s much to be pursued.” Now this is in juxtaposition to his opposition earlier on to going ahead with the Supra as they called it.
MR. LARSON: That was a tremendous breakthrough and of course there has been some debate since then you might say who among, there was Teller, several others.
DR. GLENNAN: Stan Ulam…
MR. LARSON: Ulam.
DR. GLENNAN: …was really as much responsible as Teller, but Teller was certainly the salesman. In any event, I will never forget that meeting. I sat there and listened and listened, my eyes were like this, you know, and I finally asked Harry Smithe as we walked over to lunch, the meaning of a term that had been used by Teller and he gave me the meaning, and Clarence, I have never used that term since, and I have never heard it used nor seen it used.
MR. LARSON: I’ll be darn.
DR. GLENNAN: I’m not going to tell you what it is now.
MR. LARSON: Well that’s interesting.
DR. GLENNAN: I’m sure it has no real significance as a matter of classification now, but I still have that feel that is something I never want to talk about. I went back to Case and was there for about, let’s see, 1952 to 1958, six years when Jim Killian [sp?] called and said, “Will you come down? I want to talk with you about a post, an important post, the head of the space agency.” I said, “My God, Jim, I don’t quite understand. I don’t know anything about space. I don’t know which end of a rocket you light.”
MR. LARSON: Yes. Let’s see, by that time of course the Russians had launched Sputnik.
DR. GLENNAN: Sputnik, yes. I remember, you recall that now, October 4, 1957, when Sputnik went up. I was a member of the National Science Board at that time and our Vanguard program was being funded through the National Science Board. There were all the snide remarks about this Russian accomplishment, didn’t believe it, and all that sort of thing, just a grapefruit up there. I remember calling and sending a telegram to Alan Waterman saying they can’t be second in everything all the time. Send them a telegram that is fulsome and gives them the praise and the credit for having done this. They beat us to it, why don’t you acknowledge it. That’s the way I viewed that kind of international competition at that time. I went down to see Jim, he gave me the law which had been signed on July 29 of ’58, ’57, ’58. I read it with him and looked at it and said, “Here is one thing that’s going to be troublesome right away. We had to keep the military advised is what we were doing. It sounded very much like the old military liaison committee which gave us a lot of trouble in the AEC. Well I went over to see the next day with Jim, Mr. Eisenhower. I had met Mr. Eisenhower once before and I don’t think he remembered it, but I had been called back from a vacation to head one of the Taft-Hartly panel investigations when the Paducah plant was going on strike. We rendered a report in two or three days, interestingly enough John [inaudible] was a member of that panel and he later became a commissioner, but Mr. Eisenhower was very pleasant. I don’t really recall very much except that I became an admirer of him. I never left his office without the feeling that I had been in the presence of a truly great man and a man that I would serve to the death. It was a strange feeling that I had.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well he exuded leadership.
DR. GLENNAN: He was a true king. Yes. well the upshot was that I did go and take the job, sworn in on July 19 and went to work on August 9 and was there for 30 months. We built NASA on the ashes, if you will, of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. I had said that I would not take the job unless Hugh Driden would be my deputy. Hugh Driden was then the head, the director of NACA.
MR. LARSON: You were there at a time when Hugh Driden, wasn’t he in Cleveland? Was that one of…
DR. GLENNAN: No, he was in Washington.
MR. LARSON: But one of the big instillations was in Cleveland.
DR. GLENNAN: Louis Laboratory there. We had 8,000 people in NACA that Fall, three big laboratories, Langley, Ames out in Moffett field in California and Louis in Cleveland. We had two smaller laboratories, Wallops Island on the Virginia coast and the High Speed Flight Station out at Edwards field.
MR. LARSON: Fine. Well, fine. That was a fascinating, I was wondering if we might just take a little break here.
[Break in video]
DR. GLENNAN: Well, Hugh was one of God’s very, very fun people. He was wise. He was a fine scientist. He had a great reputation, internationally as well as in this country. We worked together quite well. Actually, I suppose we set that up as sort of an office of the administrator and there was Hugh and myself and I had insisted on an associate administrator. Everybody accuses me of carrying over the general manager concept form the commission on that and I guess it’s probably correct.
MR. LARSON: It worked very well.
DR. GLENNAN: It did work very well and it still is there. Only now I have more than one associate administrator. Imagine again going from Case where at that time I suppose my budget might have been $7 million. On the day I was sworn in, Hugh took me over to meet some of the staff at the Dolly Madison house which was our headquarters in those days. The newest agency in town, in the oldest house in town, and they put a budget in front of me for $615 million.
MR. LARSON: That was quite a…
DR. GLENNAN: I was flabbergasted. I said go ahead and that I think was pretty much the way we ran it from then on. We were conservative, yes. I found myself very much in tune with Mr. Eisenhower. I don’t recall Mr. Eisenhower ever telling me to do any particular thing. I saw Ike I suppose, once every three weeks and never waited more than a half a day to see him. He was very responsive. I recall one time when I was, I guess, a little fed up with the fact that every time you wanted to see the boss there was a [inaudible] or two or three others perhaps taking notes of what we were saying. Leaving a meeting one morning, I said to Tom Stephens, the appointment secretary, “Tom, does anybody ever see the boss alone? Without the note takers?” He says, “Why don’t you try?” I said, “All right. Set me up a date.” That afternoon I had an hour and a quarter with Mr. Eisenhower, by myself.
MR. LARSON: That’s an amazing story.
DR. GLENNAN: I went in and I said, “Mr. President, I don’t want anything except the opportunity just to chat with you. I want to tell you what I am thinking about, what the long range future looks like to me, I want to get some reactions that I think you ought to know where I’m trying to head this agency.” Within 15 minutes, Ike was up stomping around that room, cursing, “God damn, Glennan, we can’t let these monkeys get ahead of us that way.” He was not one who believed in a race with the Russians. He wanted to be able to put up a house into space and we had nothing that would move more than a few pounds. He was not a space cadet, nor was I. I thought that we had to push as fast as we could in the white hot light of the public interest in those days, I guess that’s still much that way, but not to the extent that we have it. We had to staff, develop a program, develop relationships with the Congress and the military, all of these things, and finish up the jobs that Herb York and ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency] had undertaken before NASA was brought into being. So it was a struggle every day and something new all the time, good people, great people. That’s one thing I would like to say in this session. I have made speeches about the quality of the people that I worked with in the government, at the AEC, at NASA and at the State Department. I have told industrialists, “You’d be proud to have anyone of those people on your staff.” The fact that they are labeled bureaucrats and all the rest of that is unfortunate, but that’s what happens when you get a big organization and it gets a little bit stagy and you get so many checks and balances that things don’t get done as rapidly as you would like to see them. Well, that’s not the fault of the eye on the firing line.
MR. LARSON: Of course you had the opportunity to be in two large very key agencies more or less at the early stages…
DR. GLENNAN: Exactly.
MR. LARSON: …when things were really happening and essentially the heavy hand of bureaucracy had not taken over in either one.
DR. GLENNAN: You’re quite right. You’re quite right and I will always be grateful for that. Well we, I suppose that in those days we might have tried six, seven shots a year, maybe get one of them that would work. It was simply because we had to use the boosters of the rockets that were available. They were for the most part military rockets that were just then being designed and built. Most of them hadn’t been rated as useful in combat or anything else, but we did start a long range program which finally ended up with a Saturn. That was, I called a meeting on the 19th of December. It’s strange how dates do stick in your mind, in 1958. I had been there about three months, four months and we invited all of the manufacturers and all of our laboratory people and all of the services. The services sort of didn’t want to come, but they did come. We started out then to lay out the Scout, which was a little pencil thin rocket that we used for launches down at Wallops Island, on up through the Nova, so-called, which was the big 20 foot bell rocket engine with a million and a half pound thrust. No one had ever built one. On February 5, I signed the contract for that, $105 million. Rocket-On took that on. Now that, Clarence, was in the February of 1959 and the rockets that used that engine, F-1 engine, didn’t fly for six years. That’s the kind of time scale you were on. I also ran into an interesting experience, a neophyte still in government because at the commission, Gordon Dean, he was a chairman, he did most of the testifying and we backed him up, but very seldom did I get into any debates on the Hill or get really to understand how the Hill and its staff worked. I had to learn that all very fast when I was the administrator and I found it to be an interesting and a very rewarding experience. My first real battle there was with Stu Symington who I thought was a, well, I didn’t have much respect for him. He had been head of Emerson Electric. He, when my legislative liaison man, Jim Gleeson took me up there to meet him, talk with him, he gave me a lecture on management. Well I thought I knew as much about management as he did and I excused myself as soon as I could, but then he was chairman of a subcommittee that was trying to figure out why we weren’t integrating our planning with the Air Force. I just had to say we just started. We don’t know what we have yet. We’re building an organization, all that sort of thing, but I went back from that meeting determined that we were going to have a long range plan. It took about a year. [Inaudible] Stuart was the man that I gave that job to and in about a year we had a ten year program and interestingly enough. With the exception of the Gemini and of course some of the science shots, everything that was flown up to the Apollo, up through the Apollo was in our ten year plan. Even the configuration of Apollo. George Lowe brought something into me in 1960. He had been up all night. He was unshaven. He didn’t have a necktie on, he apologized, and so I just took my necktie off and said, “Sit down. What you got?” He gave his concept of a three module package that would go to the moon, hadn’t decided whether it would be an earth orbit or a lunar orbit, that sort of thing, but those…
MR. LARSON: I was stressed to hear of his death the other day.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes. One of the finest men I ever knew. Had a great future ahead of him. He done, every job he ever took, he did to perfection. The last one at [inaudible] I don’t think anybody has made as great an impact on an institution, of a higher education in the five, six, seven years that he had there, as George has done. It’s a great loss to the country.
MR. LARSON: Incidentally, I mentioned George, did you, what is your recollection of Wernher Von Braun? His particular era.
DR. GLENNAN: Well, now we’re back up a little bit. As I looked at our capabilities, NACA had been active in sounding rockets and things of that sort and the Naval Research Laboratory people had come over with us with Vanguard, had that kind of experience. It just looked to me that we didn’t have the kind of moxy in the space vehicle business, the rocket booster business that we needed. So, in that first fall, 1958, probably two months after we had gotten into business, I said to Hugh, I’m going to try and get Von Braun’s team transferred to us. Hugh, a wise man, said, “I don’t know, Keith, that’s going to be a real battle and I’m not sure I would try that as early as this.” I said, “Hugh we must do everything we can to move this program ahead and work at the cutting edge of all the technologies and we don’t have people that understand that business as much as Von Braun and the people that he brought with him from Germany and were working with him then ABMA, Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama.” Well I certainly did learn. Hugh backed me up completely. He had had his say, I made the decision, he just supported me right straight through. I went over and talked with Neal McElroy and with Roy Johnson who was head of ARPA and with Herb York. They all agreed that this should be done. Then there was a chap by the name of Bill Holiday who was sort of an overseer of the ballistic missile program for the Defense Department at that time out of the secretary’s office and he thoroughly agreed that it should be done. You see, there was a dichotomy between the Army on the one side who was bucking for a big part in the ballistic missile game and the Air Force on the other side where you had the space technology laboratories and [inaudible] running those out there on the West Coast. It was just duplication, the Jupiter and the Thor, the Red Stone and something else. I secured the agreement with Neal McElroy and Don Quarrels who was Deputy Secretary of Defense at the time and they said, “Well maybe you better go down and talk with Wilbur Brecker, the Secretary of the Army.” Not really understanding, I had never met Mr. Brecker, what I was going to get into. I said, “All right.” Bill Holiday offered to go with me, thank God. We went down there and here is Mr. Brecker and to the side are Jack Henrick [sp?] and Arthur Tudo [sp?] Lieutenant Generals with stone faces, didn’t say a word throughout that entire discussion and I led off by telling Mr. Brecker what I thought we needed. We wanted really to…
[Break in audio]
DR. GLENNAN: …the continuation of the programs of the Army that the, that Von Braun’s team was active in, but we needed them to get on with the civilian space program. I could see him purse his lips as I kept talking and he finally said, “You couldn’t have them if you had all the guns in this Army. You’ll just try to split up the Von Braun team.” I said, “Mr. Brecker, I have no intention of splitting up anything. They have built a great reputation. They have accomplished a great many things. I don’t know Mr. Von Braun, but I would like the opportunity to talk with him and I think from what I have heard, he has a great deal of interest in space, in particularly in going to some of the other planets and going to the moon.” Well, it was a nasty talk for about a half an hour and I finally excused myself. The next morning, well later that night, I had a call from a reporter for the Cleveland [inaudible] telling me what was going to appear the next morning in the Baltimore Sun. I’ve forgotten the name of the military affairs reporter for the Sun, but when it came out, Clarence, it was word for word what had been said in that meeting.
MR. LARSON: Amazing.
DR. GLENNAN: Just word for word. I guess that was one of the few times I just hit the ceiling. I asked them for another meeting with Brecker, but I said, “Mr. Brecker, Secretary Brecker, I want to talk with you alone. I’m not going to have anybody with me and I don’t need any of your generals with you.” So he went in and sat down and I went through this again and he talked about splitting the team and I said, “Mr. Brecker, you know this is a common place thing in industry. You build a good team and then you split off a part of it to take on another important job and you really fertilize the breath and spectrum of a laboratory by splitting off chunks of teams that have worked well together.” He leaned across the desk at me, “You young whipper-snapper, you trying to tell me I don’t know how to run a laboratory?” Well, I was by that time, I guess a little more in control of myself and I just laughed at him and I said, “Mr. Brecker, I’m not trying to tell you anything. I’m just trying to get you to see that we would not really harm your ABMA team but we would get a lot done for this nation if we could have a portion of Von Braun’s people.” That ended that. I was out on the West Coast making a visit to Ames Laboratory when word came that the Army had decided to give us JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was a contractor to the Army, to the ABMA people. That seemed to me to make some sense. Hugh and I went out to see [Lee] Dubridge at Cal Tech which was suppose to be the overseer of the laboratory. Well I was surprised when Lee told me he hadn’t been out of the lab for three years. I’ve always characterized it this way. The Army who are good people, they knew enough to get very good people serving them. JPL had no peer in scientists active in this rocketry field and they worked with the Army well enough, because they could tell the Army what they were going to do and do it. Well, when they got over, when we finally took them over and I thought we just put them in with the Louis’ and the Ames’ and Langley’s, but it never quite worked that way. I guess it should have, but there wasn’t any management there. It was, Bill Pickering was a fine person, good leader, but not a manager, and I can remember when Neal and I went in, no, it wasn’t, yes, Neal McElroy and I went in with a paper we were going to sign and ask him to sign it as an executive order, transferring the JPL to NASA. I looked up and he said, “I thoroughly disagree with this. I think you ought to take ABMA now, but I will respect your having come to this conclusion.” A year later we did get Von Braun, but we got it on my terms, not on Mr. Brecker’s terms.
MR. LARSON: Well that’s a fascinating story there. A very important one.
DR. GLENNAN: Yeah, I think so.
MR. LARSON: That shows the difficulty in getting all these things together and getting all these things together was absolutely necessary for the ultimate success of the program.
DR. GLENNAN: I don’t suppose one should tell some of the less flattering sides of an operation such as this. [John] Medaris, General Medaris was head of ABMA and I think it’s worth telling this. He was a martinet. He had side boys outside of his office, all of them six foot three or more, white gloves and white pâtés and all of that. When he went around he had a swagger stick all the time. He was a real martinet. When we were in the final negotiations for ABMA, Von Braun in the fall of 1959, I went down to Huntsville to see some work on the big, on what they were then calling the Saturn, yes. It was going to be one big engine. No, it wasn’t either, it was going to use, I guess, it was a J engine, but a cluster of them, five of them as I recall it. But it was one that would finally take one big engine and become Saturn, Saturn-1. I rode around the reservation with Medaris and I noticed every place we stopped he ran in [inaudible]. Finally we were about two-thirds through the trip and he asked me to come to his office. I said, “Fine, I’ll chat with you.” When we sat down, he said, “Now Dr. Glennan, I know there is a move afoot to move Von Braun and good portion of his team out of here.” I said, “No, I don’t think it’s quite that way, but I really don’t know that much about it.” I had to play it a little bit dumb. He said, went on to say, “Their big project is the Saturn-1 and if you’ll give me your word that the Saturn-1 will be continued, I’ll go to Washington and advocate the transfer of the Von Braun group to NASA.” The legislation had run long enough then so that any transfer of that sort, which could have been made by just an executive order as was the case with JPL, had to be proposed to Congress and lay on the desk for 60 days and then be approved, unless they wanted to approve it earlier, the Congress. I went up to my friends on the Hill, the space committees in the Senate and the House and urged that decisions be taken ahead of the 60 days. We needed to get on with what we wanted to be doing. So they called a hearing and to my amazement, General Medaris went up there and opposed this after having told me this, that he was going to support it. Well, I was taken aback, but I wasn’t going to lose the ABMA, we just had to wait until the 60 days had run and that’s what happened. And as you know, he later became a priest. I think maybe his atoning for his…
MR. LARSON: That’s an amazing story. Well, that certainly clarifies all of these difficult decisions that had to be made during the early days of the space program.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes. I, just before I took that office I took a weeks’ vacation because I had to finish up a report for Case and I developed a philosophy that I wanted to use in guiding me. I have it all written out in a diary now, but one of the elements in it was that I was not going to Washington to add people to the federal payroll. When I showed this to some of my colleagues at NASA, they laughed at me. As I say, we went in with 8,000 of NASA people. We began bringing in JPL, some people from the Signal Corps and some people from the NRL, and finally the Von Braun group and when I left 30 months later, our roster was 18,000. We had gone up 10,000 but only 1,200 of them were new hires.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. So essentially it was just a consolidation of…
DR. GLENNAN: Yeah, gathering the people that really wanted to work in it, you see.
MR. LARSON: I can see the expansion of the program was a great task and a great accomplishment.
DR. GLENNAN: Well, I stayed on until our record became a little better. We had some successful flights and the engines were going into static tests and that sort of thing. I left on January 20, 1961 when Mr. Kennedy came in.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. In the meantime, there was the election and the new administration.
DR. GLENNAN: Then I went back again to Case.
MR. LARSON: Then you returned to Case. Well, fine. That’s a wonderful story of the origins of NASA and we all know what followed after that is well known in history.
DR. GLENNAN: Oh boy, I know.
MR. LARSON: So, well fine. Then how long did you stay at Case then.
DR. GLENNAN: I stayed at Case then until 1965. I had made up my mind when I first started at Case in 1947 that 10 years was long enough for any college president. I thought you would get stale on the job. I talked with people like John Mason at [inaudible] who quit at the end of five, or ten years and went to one of the colleges in Minnesota, I can’t recall.
MR. LARSON: Was it Carlton?
DR. GLENNAN: Carlton, yes. In any event I never was at Case for more than six years in any one consecutive span of years, because of these two trips down here. But I was getting to the point where some young faculty would come in and they would have some ideas and they sounded pretty good, but I would say, “Well that sounds like a pretty good idea, but we had the same problem six years ago and we did this, that, and the other thing, and it worked. Why don’t we just do that again?” Well when you start putting the lid on the bright young ones, you better get off. When you start going around the track the third time with the same thing, it’s time to get off. Ray [inaudible] accepted the post, but he withdrew six months later, or six weeks later and I stayed on half-time and went to AUI, the Associated University as president half-time and that was the worst decision I ever made. I thought, you know, I could work at Case one week, work at AUI the other week. Many weeks I made two round trips between Washington, we had moved to Washington, we were living in Washington. I had an apartment in New York. By March of 1966 I had had it, so I left and went full-time then with AUI where I stayed until ’68. I was not really a very good choice for AUI. I wasn’t enough of a scientist, Clarence. I was a manager. I had done very well with people, but not where I was dealing with a bunch of high-energy physicists that whom there are no more egotistical people in my…
MR. LARSON: That’s a well-known fact. Plus you have all those diverse universities who integrated.
DR. GLENNAN: I found working with the universities wasn’t too hard, but I tried to bring them in. I tried to have the presidents, I went to see each one of the presidents. Nobody had done that before. It was a sort of, why don’t we make something more of AUI, it’s done a wonderful job for the commission and the nation all these years and it has all the competence that could be used for other things. We did look at a tropical marine laboratory down in Puerto Rico, even got one U.S. Marine to set aside, I think it was 3,000 acres near [inaudible] for a tropical marine laboratory there. I think it would have been a great thing to be able to pull off, but it fell by the wayside and SF couldn’t fund it. Nobody else was going to do it, I guess. We also had as you know the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and, so I was working with NSF and the AEC and I moved the AUI to Washington where I thought the action was. I enjoyed those years, but not as much as I might have and I’m sure not with the great good will of several of the top staff.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well that’s right. It was some very difficult and as you say there were an awful lot of prima donnas to work with. You really had not had the experience with that before. In fact, nobody has experience to do that.
DR. GLENNAN: Yeah, well then I went immediately to work with John Gardener. This was at the time, you remember the riots here in Washington and all the rest of that and John started a thing called the Urban Coalition. He asked me to come and join him and I did and I worked with him for about a year and a half raising money for him to fund it for about two years of his work. Going out on the hostings and getting money from corporations. It was very easy, well, not very easy, but it was easy enough because everybody had the upmost respect for John and what he was trying to do. It was to bring all parties into a dialogue. I left that, and after about a year and a half, I was beginning to have trouble with what is known as peripheral neuropathy as a result of my being a diabetic, hard to walk around, increasingly hard and the first thing I know I get a call from [Glenn] Seaborg who is then chairman of the commission, asked me to come out and he wanted me to stand for the post of U.S. representative for the International Atomic Energy Agency.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: I remember Byron [inaudible] was the one who came in to brief me. I had never had much in the way of international experience, none in international diplomacy of course, but some in the time that I worked in England and on the continent, very early in my career. I finally decided that this might be something worthwhile. Harry Smithe was then the U.S. Representative had been for I think eight or nine years.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GLENNAN: So I went over for a June board meeting, just to see what was happening, what this was all about. Again, I was in a new business where I had no chance to do any of the dirty nitty-gritty with my hands and feel it, but I stayed there for three years. We did the safe guards.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes, that was a very important meeting.
DR. GLENNAN: You were at the commission at that time.
MR. LARSON: Let’s see. No, I didn’t join the commission…
DR. GLENNAN: That was 1970.
MR. LARSON: That’s right. Yes. Oh yes. I remember now because of your work on the safe guard. That’s what…
DR. GLENNAN: I came over and briefed you from time to time.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. GLENNAN: So that post held the personal rank of ambassador and I pretty well wound up my career when I finished off there, although I kept working with Herman Polick [sp?] as a consultant at state, went back to Russia a couple of times.
MR. LARSON: Yes, in fact I accompanied you on one of the trips to Russia.
DR. GLENNAN: Oh yes. I remember now, but it’s been a full career, quite full life, very satisfying.
MR. LARSON: There is an amazing diversity in your career. It started so many things.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes.
MR. LARSON: That’s always, there is a great deal of satisfaction in the new challenges that must have come along every time.
DR. GLENNAN: People often ask me with a diverse set of experiences such as you’ve had, which really gave you the most satisfaction? Strangely enough it was the academic experience.
MR. LARSON: That’s very interesting.
DR. GLENNAN: Going in there with a bachelor’s degree, nothing more, never having taught a day in my life, really except for that unfortunate experience as a substitute teacher in a high school room, but to go in there and greet incoming freshman with their mothers and fathers, they’re a little bit shy about leaving these kids. They didn’t know that they could make it, you know, the experiences that they were going to be subjected to. Then four years later these kids walking across that platform, grabbed the diploma, they were going out to meet the world and that is really a great, great satisfaction to have played a small part in that. We did rebuild Case. We did make it into one of the best institutes of technology in the country I believe during my tenure there.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. It’s has a tremendous reputation now. So it must be a great deal of satisfaction that you had the opportunity to shape that into something which was quite small into a powerhouse that it is today. Well, I was wondering if there were any other points as you look back that you wanted to mention. I wanted to perhaps, this is going back a little bit, but during your stint with the AEC of course you started a much better cooperation with industry, particularly in getting started, the reactor business. Wasn’t the Atomic Energy Industrial Forum started as a result of your efforts?
DR. GLENNAN: Yes, I think so. I left the commission on October 31, I guess it was, 1952, and on the 25th of November of that year I made a speech to the Manufacturing Chemists Association. I had been talking with Oliver Townsend who was Gordon Dean’s assistant speech writer. Oliver had helped me with two or three speeches. As a matter of fact, throughout my life I’ve written almost all my own speeches. I just somehow or other, couldn’t say what other people said for me, but Oliver was better than that. He took about 20 of my speeches, got the nuances, the way I expressed myself, that sort of thing, he did a very good job and we did put together a speech which was called for the initiation of an Atomic Industrial Forum. Before the Manufacturing Chemists Association meeting, I and sometimes with Ollie, went to see Ralph [inaudible] at GE, Alfred Wittles [sp?] at Babcock-Wilcox, [inaudible] at Westinghouse, and finally wound up, there were two or three others, they all thought I, I would sit there and let them read the speech and ask them if they would participate. They would all participate, but they wouldn’t take the lead. I had come to know Walker [inaudible] out at Detroit-Edison and he invited us out when we called. So Ollie and I went out there, found Walker holed up in his office. He was in the midst of a strike. He was living in his office, but he gave us a half a day to do this thing, and he said, “Why, of course, I’ll do it.” Within weeks really, he had called together two or three meetings of industrial people, particularly those who were interested in building reactors and the larger utilities. So the Forum was born. I had chosen the name Forum because I was not interested in having another lobbying group.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. GLENNAN: While the Forum now is a lobbying group, for many, many years it stayed off that and simply tried to help understanding between industry and the AEC.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well it had quite a different mission at that period of time.
DR. GLENNAN: Yes.
MR. LARSON: It was carried out very effectively.
DR. GLENNAN: I think so. It’s a satisfaction to see it still operating and doing very good…
[End of Interview]